Garden Gate Rhymes

Memories swing on the Garden Gate:

See the young mother working late?

See children learning, yearning to please?

“I’m sorry, Mom. I hoed out some peas!"

Note: See garden gate in lower right,

Behind the weeds but still in sight.

Now I ask, “What use is the rusty, old gate?”

“Should we toss it out?” My wife screams, “Wait!

Let’s make for it a better fate.”

I say, "To hang it in the garden makes no sense.
Can't have a garden gate without a garden fence?"

"Sure we can," Nanc  says to me.
And now that it's hung, I have to agree!
The gate stands proud for us to see
Near daisies and lilies and an apple tree.













And a practical use we also found 
Was to keep the hoe up off the ground.
It's the place Mom hung her hoe away
When she quit work at the end of the day.

In autumn we replace the hoe
With a not-too-scary scarecrow.

In winter's cold the garden gate
Provides a place to decorate.
In bright white snow of a winter scene,
we place a wreath of red and green.

Mom loved a garden, green and dense,

And in final years there was no fence.

At 75 years she worked that ground

And ate the harvest all year round.

The gate still hung on posts of old

That I "helped" Dad erect, I'm told.

Memory: Drilling into freshly cut white oak posts by hand with a rusty brace and a dull bit, Dad made slow progress, but by shear strength and determination, he bore two holes large enough to screw the hinges into. 

This closeup shows the hinge in a hole I drilled into a
treated post using an electric drill about 60 years after
Dad  had mounted the gate on the oak post.