Hoe Hum
By Ed Zern
My friends Marvin and Grace Marie Chase recently bought a farm near
the Esopus Creek, and last summer I dropped in to find them busy with
the thousand-and-one chores that people who buy farms find themselves
busy with. But Marvin knocked off whitewashing the manure pile, or
whatever it was he was doing, and conducted me around the place,
showing me the various points of interest. These included an acre of
eating corn which he was endeavoring to keep free of weeds - and he
showed me the hoe with which he chopped the offensive flora. It
looked more like a child's toy than a regular hoe, and woefully
inadequate to cope with a field of weed-infested corn.
"That's an awfully small hoe, isn't it?" I said. "Why don't you
get a full-sized one?"
Marvin eyes me indignantly. "Of course it's a small hoe!" he
said. "Any nincompoop can chop weeds with a full-sized hoe. But
with this hoe, it takes skill, strategy and weedcraft - and the
weeds have a fighting chance! Furthermore, just feel this -" and
he handed me the skimpy instrument. "Feel that balance! Not too
much whip, either - and plenty of backbone in that handle, and the
action's sort of semiparabolic. It's exactly the kind of hoe that
Payne or Jim Lindsay or Garrison would make if they made hoes!"
And so, when I had admitted that it was indeed a beautifully balanced
stick, light in hand and ideally suited to precision hoeing - in short,
calculated to make weed control a thoroughly sporting proposition - we
continued our tour of the Chase acres.
Having worked on a farm in my youth, I spied several other items
that aroused my curiosity. But I kept my big mouth shut.
~ Ed Zern
Credits: From How To Catch Fishermen published by
Appleton Century Crofts.
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