. . . my mother looked out an open window in 1947 and sighed. A drought had doomed her pepper garden, turning her pepper plants into hay, and she didn’t know how to save them. She said, "I wish we had a HORNBLENDE."
I said, "HORNBLENDE? What's a HORNBLENDE?" She said, "It's a plume-shaped pitchfork you use to turn over dormant seeds from previous planting seasons. That's what we did in the old days."
