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When Fond Memories Grow Through Gardening

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - Good garden tools can last a lifetime – or two or three – if you take care of them.

Like my grandfather's spade; I can't tell you how old it is exactly, but by the time I got it, the wooden handle already had paper masking tape covering a repair made decades ago. The top of the handle had apparently split at some point, and so Pop-Pop had patched it with a piece of a dowel he'd whittled to fit the space perfectly, and the spade kept going throughout his life and into the 21st century when it came to me.

Holding the pieces of his spade in my hand, I felt closer to my grandfather than ever. Here I am taking care of a tool he had fixed up, so he could keep gardening – which was both his job and his hobby. I re-patched his repair with a modern wood epoxy, chatting to my grandfather as I worked, and telling him the handle is probably good to go for another fifty years or more now - when I hope whoever inherits it next will keep it going into yet another century.

Reported By Phran Novelli, KYW Newsradio

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