A Good Hoe

My parents are farmers.  The legit kind.  My dad goes to his executive job during the week to buy his farm time on weekends.  My mom doesn't report to work, so she uses much of her daily brain capacity to contemplate things like seed and fruit tree grafting with extreme determination.

This background is necessary to understand the significance of this story.  You see, when I first moved into my home, my parents lent me a hoe.  Since I am their daughter, I am rather capable with a hoe.  I had no other option.   Turns out, these hoe skills transfer nicely to machete skills when doing yardwork in rural Mexico - but that's another story for another time.  Despite these skills, I was lost on why they chose the hoe to be what they lent.  I mean, I have a very small yard.  I wouldn't consider it adequate for row crops.  But my parents do lots of strange things so I let it go.         

Today, while sorting antique tomato seed at my parents house, we were discussing plants a friend gave me for my yard.  I said I needed to plant these items in the next couple of days because she needs her shovel back by Tuesday.  My mother promptly made nervous eye contact with my dad and said "But we lent you a hoe."  I said "Yes, but I need a shovel to dig a good hole."  Silence.  My mother and my father put their projects down.  Noticing this, I made it worse by saying "How do I dig a hole with a hoe?"  At this, my mother closed her eyes and her shoulders fell.  My dad stammered out, defeatedly,  "Well, you just keep digging at it until it's big enough..." 

Let me say, I've always been a good girl.  My parents almost never had to correct me, and they certainly didn't have to sit me down for poor choices in high school.  Therefore, this was perhaps the most disappointed in me I'd ever seen my parents.  In their farming world, shovels are for fake farming city-folk unless you're planting trees of significant size or taking from a pile of manure or mulch.  The skilled use of a good hoe replaces the need for a large range of tools.  Later, I could have pinched myself because I knew better.  And I've dug countless holes with a hoe, but they were most all holes for petunias or marigolds, single plants - not bushes, which is what I thought I needed the shovel for.

I promised to make use of the hoe in the future and then quickly changed the subject and we all moved along.  Still, it stuck with me.  This was the closest to an "intervention" that my parents have ever had with me.  They were just that serious.  On the bright side, if some mild shovel/hoe confusion is what they're most concerned about, I must be doing ok.