A time for wheelbarrows

August 3, 2019August 4, 2019
by Jan Woodard

My husband surprised me with a wheelbarrow today.

Me, the one with gray hair, trifocals and a walking stick.

Not that I’m counting, but it says a lot about a marriage when a guy gives his wife of forty-nine years, seven months and one day a pushcart for yard work.

“You bought me a wheelbarrow?” I said. “Why?”

“You said you wanted one… and it was $39.00.”

“Oh. Yeah. I did.”

Jim doesn’t need a wheelbarrow. He uses a metal cart he welded together to haul stuff around the yard, pulled by a tractor. I don’t do tractors. But I do weed flower beds and hate asking him to clean up after me.

He rode his cycle earlier to Walmart. Bright clearance stickers on the last few wheelbarrows of the season caught his eye; he asked them to hold one until he returned with a car.

I pictured a shiny red one to replace our old rusty wheelbarrow. (It was in this point in the story that Jim began grinning as I read a draft to him. He suddenly understood my wheelbarrow-of-choice didn’t match his intended purchase.)

“Do you want to go with me to pick it up?” he asked.

In my universe, this qualifies as a date. The night before we watched lightning bugs at Yellow Creek and an evening earlier we attempted unsuccessfully to catch goldfish for our water garden from a friend’s pond. Three dates in a row!

As we rode down the hill I spotted a gray plastic tote that looked like a garbage can on wheels in a neighbor’s yard.

“Is it plastic?” I asked. I never considered a plastic wheelbarrow, but isn’t everything made of plastic these days?

“Yes.”

I was disappointed. I like red metal wheelbarrows, with wooden handles. Like Grandpa, Daddy and we used to have.

When I was beginning to take writing seriously I attended a poetry workshop. The instructor read us a poem I’ve never forgotten called, “The Red Wheelbarrow.”

It’s simplicity, imagery and brevity appealed to me. That poem has forever informed my writing style. If my writing sometimes appears to be clipped, blame William Carlos Williams and the poem he published in 1923:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Williams taught me the power of imagery. I felt like I was looking out a window at the wheelbarrow, the white chickens, could hear and sniff the rain. I was there in that moment with him, entering into the scene he painted.

Thus, I like red wheelbarrows.

When we reached the store I was happy to see my new wheelbarrow didn’t look like a garbage can on big wheels. It’s black, heavy-duty molded plastic with bright yellow handles and comfortable black hand grips that won’t give me splinters.

I like it. If I happen to be pushing it down the road at night –”Why?” I’m sure my children will ask– those bright yellow handles will glow in the light of oncoming traffic, warning drivers that Grandma is out and about with her wheelbarrow.

Jim listened as I read and said with a chuckle, “So you aren’t considering this your (golden) anniversary gift?”

Actually, I consider every day I’m alive a gift.

Every laugh a bonus.

Every sunset pure gold.

It says a lot about a guy’s perspective that he gives his wife a wheelbarrow simply because she asked for one (even if it was on clearance).

It says he has faith his best friend will be pushing it up and down hills for summers to come, knowing better than anyone she lives with the daily unpredictability of advanced cancer.

Did you hear about a fellow named Blondin who pushed a wheelbarrow on a tightrope over Niagara Falls in the 1800s? As the story goes, when he reached the middle he took out a stove, fried an egg, ate it and continued on his way.