This week, I have been using this hay fork to shift wood chips from in front of the chipper to a farther pile. And every time I secure the fork back into the pile, I can’t help but remember my first encounter with a pitchfork.
I was six or seven years old and my next door neighbors, the Eilerts, were putting a garden in their back yard. Their kids were doing the digging and labor. I really wanted to help, but they were older than me and I was deemed too little. They kept shooing me away to watch from a distance.
But when they all went in for lunch and left me there, I decided I was not too little. I could do some digging while they ate. So I picked up the heavy, wide-tined pitchfork and confidently slammed it down into the dirt and into my big toe. It hurt. It was bleeding. I was embarrassed and angry at myself for failing. I started to cry. Nobody was around, so I rescued myself by pulling the pitchfork out of my foot and hobbling up the hill to our own back door. I tried not to move my toe too much, but the canvas shoe I was wearing got redder and redder as I walked.
Mom was flustered by my sobbing and my bloody sneaker, even though she was a nurse and completely capable of assessing a patient’s needs. I think this might have been the first time I had come to harm, aside from slamming my fingers the old farmhouse cabinets. She whisked me off to the doctor’s office where she worked. The doctor gave me a stitch. Just one. I was proud of that scar for a long time.
50 years later, the little scar is gone but the memory lingers. I will be careful with the hayfork.
