The Garden Next Door

  Last week I got permission to hunt my neighbor's rather large garden, which sits in the center of an enormous lawn; and this lawn was once part of the nineteenth-century farm that included both the neighbor's house and my own. Well, the ground finally thawed enough to get a spade in sometime late Sunday afternoon and I spent an hour or so pacing back and forth across last year's furrows while my fiance worked on a paper for school.
  I found mostly the usual unrecognizable rusty pieces of old farm junk and lead bullets (which makes me think it is a good idea to metal detect all gardens to avoid food contamination). However, I was happy to find a small copper buckle, probably from a shoe or boot and another spoon to add to my found spoon collection. I don't know what it is, but I find these spoons everywhere I go. I suspect that nineteenth-century Mainers just carried spoons around with them in their pockets, in case they came across some soup or something in the woods. Anyway, I love the damn spoons. I am fascinated by the shapes they adopt while buried inside the earth.

  Currently, my spoon collection is being used in a large plant pot in our living room, stuck into the potting soil upright to prevent our crazy cat, Howard, from using it as a litter box.