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Eden’s Border: Where Objects Have Stories

Eden’s Border: Where Objects Have Stories

Last updated on: January 19, 2016 at 11:30 am by A. G. Harmon

Eden’s Border: Where Objects Have Stories 2016-01-19T11:30:11-07:00 A. G. Harmon

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We’ll have to go back to the gun shop today. There’s no way around it. It seems that the barrel with the modified choke got left there when my mother placed the twenty-gauge up for sale sometime before Christmas. But since there weren’t any takers, we went back to the shop to retrieve it when I got home in December. Unfortunately, the owner forgot to give us the other barrel, so we’ll have to go back. My brother has decided he wants it.

The only reason she was selling this shotgun out of the many others we have is because nobody could remember how we came to own it or whose it was in the first place. Coming from a long line of hunters, our family has stories behind these weapons. Among them, there’s a rifle with a scope my grandfather deer hunted with (we used to have two buck heads that he kept mounted on his wall in the study), an A.H. Fox with an engraved plate that my other grandfather traded a man for during the Depression, a 410 that my own father began to hunt with, and an Ithaca with a sawed-off stock that I was given as a boy because the gun was originally too long for me.

Of course, each of these things carries a cache of stories behind it, and memories of long walks in bracing weather through fields of sage grass and beside fencerows of pennyroyal bushes. We raised bird dogs, so they were all about during those walks, their tales flashing like flags, their breath wild with expectation. The picture of a setter when he’s on point, every muscle tense with pent energy as he waits for the birds to be flushed, is just as rewarding as anything that happens afterward. In life, the moments just prior to the ultimate consummation may be the least remarked upon of our many joys here.

When I was a boy, it was my job to feed the dogs, whose pens were in a field behind the house. I would tramp down there every afternoon when school was out, climb the fences with a bucket of dog food, and beat back the frenzied pleasure of each dog as I entered his cage. There was no running water down there, so I had to edge out across a tree that had fallen into a nearby cow pond, scoop up water in the now empty bucket, and haul it back to the pens to pour into each dog’s water pale.

But back to the gun. Since none of us gets to bird hunt like we used to (most of the farm is developed now, and few places remain where people will let you quail hunt), the hoped-for sale of one of the many weapons we have was sensible. And as to this one, as I’ve said, nobody knows how we came to own it. We can trace the lineage of the others, but not this one.

I’ve decided that without any tie to a narrative, a thing is as cut loose as a rock in outer space. Even a fairly innocuous memory—a purchase, a gift, a trade—anything that explains how an inanimate object has crossed the path of a life, can require one to take pause over it. It may still be sold or discarded, but it goes with a story at least, so that the disposal is a conscious one.

In the same vein, we were also selling saddles this Christmas—or trying to, at least. Just like hunting, we don’t get to ride much anymore. My parents raised and sold horses my whole life, and at one time before the farm was broken up, there were eighteen brood mares on the place (along with herds of polled Hereford and Brangus cattle). We used the horses too; they weren’t just for sale and show. We got up the cattle with them. But since all that’s passed, a barn full of western and English saddles just isn’t required anymore. Still, after all of our cleaning and polishing of the leather, the only ones we could put up for sale with a clear conscience are the ones that weren’t tied to a good story. That’s not good business, I suppose; nevertheless.

But I wonder how many things now accumulate stories about them. These items that I speak of are related to a rural past and to rural pastimes. They come from time spent with family and friends during episodes of work and play. Without the occasions for such use, how many narratives can spring from them? Indeed, how many stories can come from the juncture of technology and lived life?

I may be wrong, and hope that I am, but I just can’t imagine a time in which I would pause over the sale of an HD TV screen or an iPhone. I can’t fathom a tug at my conscience when I donate my Apple to charity. No tear will be shed over the accumulations of my suburban life.

But when it comes to that harness hanging on the wall, it’s a different story, and it’s different because there is a story. Perhaps the limits of affection do lie somewhere within a zone of the natural world, Eden’s border, that smells of worn leather, gun oil, and the musk of a lemon-speckled setter, lathered from her hunt.

A.G. Harmon teaches Shakespeare, Law and Literature, Jurisprudence, and Writing at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. His novel, A House All Stilled, won the 2001 Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel.

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