I've grown attached to our scarecrow
I don’t have a clue how many birds or other things our scarecrow has chased off since his creation five years ago but that no longer matters. He’s become a totem for our vegetable garden, a charming if somewhat weird and occasionally off-putting presence. He’s endured hail storms and thunderstorms from his perch above our garden outside Washington. He baked for four weeks inside a shipping container as it made its way north to Massachusetts. He was shunned and almost forgotten in the corner of our garage until he made a triumphant return to the garden this spring.
There he sits today in all his tattered, misshapen glory. The latest of many, many repairs he’s required over the years was a deft reattachment of his left-hand aluminum pie plate this week. It now pairs once again with a pie plate dangling from his right arm. They dance and clang in the breeze, sending sparkling sun rays your way if you catch it just right.
I’ll quickly note that he does not work alone. He’s partnered for his entire life with one of those garden-center owls, which nowadays sits about 12 feet from the scarecrow like a sentry staring from the rear corner of the garden out onto the field and the woods beyond.
But our scarecrow is special, most of all because he is the handiwork of Katie, my brilliant spouse with whom I am celebrating our 40th wedding anniversary this weekend. This is something of a love letter to her and her boundless creativity.
In the spring of 2019, we entertained a pair of crows who for a few weeks became semi-permanent residents on or front porch and, just below, our vegetable garden. I had planted tomatoes and labeled each with a plastic marker. One morning I went out to the garden and all of the markers — I mean all of them — were gone. Kids? Why would they bother? A devious fellow gardener? Maybe, but unlikely. The blame quickly fell on the crows, who are clever and mischievous and might just have seen the humor in flying off with a bright piece of white plastic down below. What use they made of them I’ll never know, though somewhere that summer, in some nest or back yard perhaps, sat a marker with “Cherokee Purple” or “Mortgage Lifter” written on it.
Katie said the situation clearly called for a scarecrow.
She fashioned ours out of a pin-striped Brooks Brothers shirt, the type I once wore to the office before Every Day became Casual Friday and then the pandemic threw any semblance of traditional office fashion to the winds. It was a good shirt, as I recall, but I readily handed it over. The shirt is loosely draped over a now faded red T-shirt given to the Washington Post sports department, where I used to work, by the Washington Kastles, the city’s World Team Tennis franchise. It’s the best use for it I can imagine.
The shirts sit over a wire clothes hanger, which has two wooden stakes taped to each end to extend the shoulders and arms out a bit. Up the spine is another wooden garden stake, at the top of which sits our scarecrow’s true magnificence. The head is a paper plate, now taped to a pie plate and covered with plastic packing tape. There’s a gooney, primitively drawn set of eyes, a nose and mouth, surrounded by – and this is what makes it really special – four tightly wadded balls of tin foil, each stuck to the end of a pipe cleaner. They encircle the face, giving it an odd, Martian-like appearance.
It really should be in MOMA!
I understand the Egyptians were the first humans to use scarecrows to ward off birds and other pests from their gardens. The Greeks and Romans followed suit, then the Japanese and Europeans. Kuebiko, the Shinto god of wisdom and agriculture, is represented in Japanese mythology by a scarecrow. The Germans made their scarecrows look like witches.
In the United States, immigrant farmers made their scarecrows human-like in appearance, dressing them in old coveralls or jeans and flannel shirts and stuffing them with straw. They tied red bandanas around their necks – a tradition that continues today.
Or course we all grew up with the sad, loving Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz etched in our memories. Played by Ray Bolger, straw bursting out of his clothes, he was to many the most endearing character in the film and perhaps Dorothy’s closest friend.
Who could ever forget this scene, when the Scarecrow bemoans to Dorothy what he could do in life if he only had a brain:
“I could while away the hours, conferin’ with the flowers. Consultin’ with the rain. And my head I’d be scratchin’ while my thoughts were busy hatchin’ if I only had a brain.”
I also remember my mortification when the Wicked Witch threw fire at him and his straw began to burn.
On cue, our own scarecrow’s pie plates just began banging from outside the window, perhaps sending a crow or two on their merry way. But also beckoning me to the garden to pay a visit.
A breeze is blowing and I’m amazed he’s still holding together in one piece. Good things usually last, though.