A Garden Trowel and a Gold Necklace Are the Same Object in Coyoacán
Kalinda Reyes-Sutter bends old garden tools into necklaces in a courtyard workshop. Her neighbour is waiting for hers, and the tools have not finished being tools.
Noon in the courtyard. The sun comes straight down and the workbench has no shadow.
Kalinda Reyes-Sutter clamps a trowel in a vise. The blade is the colour of the ground it came from. She leans on it with both hands and it gives a few degrees.
She does not clean it. She says the dirt has earned its place.
The secateurs are on a folded dishcloth beside her. Soil sits packed in the hinge, black and slightly damp, though it has not rained since Tuesday. The spring is still strong. Open and shut, they click like a small animal.
A bougainvillea hangs over the wall. A bloom lands on the bench. She moves it with the flat of a file.
The trowel handle is wood, dark in two places. One is where a thumb pressed for thirty years. The other is where the thumb's owner rested the tool against a hip. She leaves both. The wood will hang at the front of the necklace, against the collarbone.
Her neighbour from number 14 sits on an upturned bucket and waits. She has a paper bag of tangerines on her knee. She peels one in a single spiral and puts the peel on the step. Nobody speaks for eleven minutes.
Kalinda anneals the steel with a small torch. The blade goes straw, then blue, then a bruised purple. She lets it cool in the shade of the stairs. A hen walks through the workshop and leaves again.
The secateurs become the clasp. She opens the jaws just enough to take a chain link and no more. The hinge still has its soil. The neighbour asks if it will fall out. Kalinda says some of it will, and that this is fine.
Her price is 2,800 pesos. She says it at the end of a sentence about something else.
At two the light flattens and the courtyard fills with the smell of hot tile. At four the neighbour goes home for lunch and comes back. Kalinda is still filing.
Near seven the sky over the wall turns the blue of old denim. A streetlight outside the gate flickers on, late. The neighbour is still on her bucket. The necklace is finished.
It weighs about as much as a small stone. She lifts it with two fingers and the trowel turns slowly on its chain. A little earth drops from the hinge onto the bench.
The neighbour puts it on over her cardigan. She does not look in a mirror. She picks up the tangerine peel from the step and takes it with her.
