This is about a man and a woman from Perry.

Their story has terrible sorrow, but within it are also great love, powerful memories and an abiding wisdom.

Near the end of our conversation in late June, the woman, Carol Bryan, mentioned a line from a movie they had gone to see in Calais, 2001’s “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.”

In the months and years to come, one scene would stay with her, one line becoming her mantra.

“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”

The man in this story, Elliot Fishbein, contacted me in late 2001, eager to tell me about his new venture, Scythe Supply. The company, started on the Internet just that April, touted the beauty and practicality of European scythes. He bought the handmade blades from an Austrian firm that had been making them since 1540. Then he custom built the handles and the wooden snath, or the shaft, to an individual’s height and reach, using a design he had created.

He and I had a lively telephone conversation that was informative and amusing. He waxed poetic, saying things like the scythe “looks like a bird’s wing made out of steel.”

He invited me to join him the following summer for a lesson in “mowing,” promising it would be fun. I agreed, wondering what I had gotten myself into, then wrote a story on holiday wish lists, mentioning Elliot and Scythe Supply.

After the story ran, Elliot contacted me, excited to say that traffic on the Web site spiked dramatically and he could attribute at least two sales to the article.

I heard from him in the spring, an e-mail to alert me to an electronic address change.

As summer arrived, I thought about when I could get together with Elliot to do some “mowing.” August or so, I thought, during my vacation.

Then I saw his name in a brief story about to be printed in this newspaper.

He had been killed in an accident on Route 9.

It was July 10, 2002.

It would be 2004 before I heard from Scythe Supply again. Carol Bryan, Elliot’s partner for 22 years, remembered the story I wrote. After a few months of e-mail, we set a date to meet.

As I approached my destination in Perry, fog trailed through the treetops on the islands across Passamaquoddy Bay, shrouding the sky and sun.

I spotted a mailbox sporting a red bandanna, turned into a long driveway and found myself surrounded by a gentle slope swathed in lupine.

Rich purples and pinks stretched across the acres and only later did I discover that this was Elliot’s vision for his vast lawn.

I went to the back door, first ringing the doorbell, then knocking.

Silence.

Then came a voice from my left and out of the basement came Carol. She invited me down, apologizing because she was on the phone with a customer.

Waving me off to look around, she continued her conversation with a man who was inquiring about scythes. Her gentle, assuring tones came in answer to every question.

I looked about the room: a computer in that corner, postal boxes in that corner, scythe blades and whetstones and gadgets in another. Every compartment was tagged – all in Elliot’s handwriting, she later told me. “I’ve kept the order, all the tags that he did.”

Carol finished her call and welcomed me.

Where to begin, I wondered. Carol decided for me.

“It was interesting to see what was happening that last year” in Elliot’s life, she said.

As we walked about the basement and then the workshop, we looked at blades from Austria, rings from Czech Republic, whetstones from Europe, hammers from France and Czech Republic, ash and maple from Maine. And in between details about the business that is Scythe Supply, Carol began telling me about Elliot and herself.

Elliot grew up on Long Island, N.Y., and spent a summer on a farm in upstate New York, an experience that influenced the rest of his life. Carol grew up on a farm in Maine, which has fueled her lifelong interest in agriculture.

His first love, she said, was bicycles, and it was that interest that brought the two of them together: He fixed her bike.

The back wall of the workshop’s first floor is lined with different models, each holding a special meaning for Carol. She showed me the one she used to ride across the country one year. Some are kid-sized bikes for their younger relatives. Some are Elliot’s.

Elliot’s first calling was woodworking. He was part of a group called Chosen Works that was based in Bangor. His specialty was Shaker boxes, and one of his oval boxes is in the Maine State Museum.

He then pursued sign painting. One of his oldest carved signs is in Calais at the Boston Shoe Store. He designed and painted signs and logos on everything from the Perry Post Office to fire engines to tractor-trailer rigs to vehicles used by local electricians and plumbers. One of his most impressive works is the carved, gold-leaf sign hanging high on the courthouse building in Machias. “That’ll be there a hundred years,” Carol said.

His sign work permeates Down East Maine. “When I drive along,” she said, “I see his designs everywhere.”

As a tribute to Elliot, some of his signs now sport a bandanna. He wore one, she smiled, to cover his balding head.

Carol pursued a career as an occupational therapist in pediatrics. She said their individual work complemented the other’s: She’d deliver his signs on her way to work, and he’d build and fix toys for the children in her care.

Elliot’s interest in scythes was sparked in the late 1980s when he found a bush blade under the bed with other tools at Carol’s family camp in Belgrade Lakes. He spent a good deal of time on that trip outside with the scythe, Carol recalled with a laugh.

An aunt deepened his interest when she sent him a first edition copy of “The Scythe Book” by David Tresemer.

Carol said Elliot plunked himself on the couch with the book and said, “This is what it’s all about.”

The book later became a lure for Scythe Supply. She asked Elliot why he went to so much trouble to sell copies of it on eBay for $11. Almost 100 percent of the time, he told her, the person who bought the book ordered a scythe from him.

We entered the workshop, first discussing the history of the bicycles lining the back wall, and then we stopped for a moment near the foot of the stairs. Carol picked up a scythe and showed me Elliot’s name and his height and reach measurements written on the snath. Every snath is personalized that way.

She now uses Elliot’s blade, she said, because their measurements match.

The second floor of the shop is filled with woodworking equipment and tools. Carol said Elliot wanted it to be like an assembly line and was pleased he had achieved that effect. There’s even a lobster pot to boil the snaths in for an hour before they are set into a wedge – designed by Elliot – to be bent to the correct angle for the grass scythes.

Carol showed me the raw ash bought from an Eddington company for the snaths. Before they are sent to a Holden company for finishing and shaping, she culls the warped, the knotted, the not-quite-right ones from the lots. “My percentage of culling is the same as Elliot’s,” she said, mentioning records she’d discovered from his first year in business.

As we moved about the room, Carol picked up a box filled with variations on a theme: handles.

With numerous chuckles, she said how the box full of wood in various shapes and sizes came to be. Elliot kept trying to create the perfect handle for the snath. Every so often, he would come to her, tell her he had “the one” and show her how and why this one was the perfect handle. He’d point out different features – like a special indentation for the mower’s thumb on one version – and after Carol’s input and his deliberations, he would decide it wasn’t quite “the one.”

Carol lifted out the winner and handed it to me. The maple piece fit in my hand as if it had been made for me alone, my fingers curving around it comfortably. Its heft was perfect.

We left the shop and wandered behind the building to visit the gardens. Carol sells produce at the Calais farmers market and is certified by the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association.

After looking at the rows of vegetables and a magnificent patch of garlic and talking about rain barrels, compost piles and snakes, we found ourselves at the top of the drive looking out over the lupine toward the ocean.

It felt as if she had come to a decision when she turned to me and said that Elliot was buried on the property.

Would I like to see where?

A short walk behind the house and outbuildings, down a cross-country skiing path covered in grass, strawberries and late June wildflowers, is the small cemetery of the Perkins family, who owned the property in the 1800s.

Buried with them is Elliot.

Carol and I stood at the edge of a tight carpet of lily of the valley, their blossoms just faded, their green leaves smooth and glowing in the gray light. The plants stretched completely across the clearing, covering each gravesite and nearly concealing Elliot’s small marker. Known in years past as ladder-to-heaven and virgin’s tears, the flowers bow as if in mourning.

Carol told me about the Perkins family and how she and Elliot decided more than a decade ago that they would buy the property, if only to care for the family buried there. Elliot will be getting a new stone to match the other stones this year, she said.

It was so quiet there among trees old and new.

“How hard is this for you?” I asked.

“The surface is serene,” Carol said. “Things are smoother.”

After a few moments more of quiet, we left.

As we emerged from the woods, she recounted a pivotal event about two months after Elliot’s death. She got a call from his European suppliers. They asked if she still wanted the order Elliot had placed.

They waited for her answer, she said, and she didn’t know what to say. Elliot had set aside the money, and she knew it was likely half a year’s income for the man from Czech Republic. She knew it would feed a number of people if she said yes to the shipment. She knew the hardships it would cause if she said no.

She said yes.

She took over Scythe Supply without really knowing that much.

“I was part of that whole process,” Carol said, “but Elliot was the mower.”

She remembered the first time she took a credit card order and the overwhelming feeling of responsibility. A relative reassured her and put it in perspective, saying, “You’re not selling coffee cups.”

Aid came to her in the form of Richard Scott of Pembroke, who had gotten together with Elliot over mowing. He now is the main blade sharpener, and he helps in most areas of the business, getting orders out and customizing snaths.

On the computer end, help came from Rafi Hopkins, who keeps the electronics running smoothly when he isn’t working as a computer tech specialist for Union 104.

Much of Carol’s hard-won knowledge came from Elliot himself; she read copies of e-mails he’d sent to customers that first year.

“I did learn a lot last year,” she said.

She made a difficult decision to produce a video of Elliot teaching how to mow. It was filmed three weeks before he was killed, and shortly after his death she was reminded it had been done.

Carol remembered Elliot complained that he just couldn’t mow and talk at the same time.

When she finally could watch the uncut version, she realized it wasn’t true.

“He could talk and mow at the same time,” she said with a smile.

Since it was his intent to offer this video to get people mowing, she decided to go ahead with its production this year.

She also made a decision about her own career. She left her job as an occupational therapist, partly because what had worked so well with Elliot had been lost and partly because this business Elliot began was growing.

More than once and always with a hint of wonder in her voice, Carol said to me, “Scythe Supply has taken on a life of its own.”

Which, in the end, was Elliot’s dream.

It is a dream that has become Carol’s.

Scythe Supply will be one of the vendors at the Common Ground Country Fair on Sept. 24, 25 and 26 in Unity.

Janine Pineo is a NEWS copy desk editor and systems editor. Her e-mail is jpineo@bangordailynews.net.