A Body of Work
Yesterday I backed into the long handle of a golf club that we use to prop open the door to the chicken coop and fell backwards, landing on arthritic left thumb. I watched it all in slow motion on the way down to the cold ground, and don’t remember if I did the classic arm wind-milling in an attempt to right myself. Flat on my back and looking up at the blue above me, I smiled and chuckled to myself, rolled onto my knees and stood up.
I used to be so graceful and surefooted.
I also had fewer lines on my face, more energy and could even sprint when I wanted to. Whatever happened to that ageless thirty-two year old who could work sun up to past sundown and not reach for the Advil on her way to bed? She was the one who chuckled while considering the chicken run from a different vantage point yesterday. I expect I’ll be giving her a few more laughs before I pack up and head to the Other Side.
Before we took up the mantle of caretaker here among the trees and the furrowed fields, our bodies lent themselves to less rigorous activities of the outdoor sort. Cutting the grass, maybe trimming a hedge or two, but that was about it. Oh, and dragging a couple of trash cans to the curb once a week. Hoo-boy, talk about mopping one’s brow, eh? At our last official suburban home, we got ambitious one summer and put in a concrete path off the back steps using one of those molded heavy plastic forms that Quikcrete called a Walkmaker. You’d fill the randomly-spaced sections with a stiff crack-resistant concrete blend, lift off the form carefully and set it down again to refill until the stepping stone path of your dreams reached the garden. We were so young and in love, we drew a heart in the wet cement and put our initials inside it, using a stick to make the point and the fletching ends of an arrow on either side of the heart’s edges. It was easier back then to go through the stooping, shoveling, smoothing and tugging motions necessary for such a project; we could carry on that way for hours without a break and still have energy to safely make dinner while the cement dried. We didn’t quite get that path to its intended destination, and became distracted by some other outdoor event until we sold the house and left the molded concrete stones behind to tell an unfinished story for the new owners. If nothing else, they knew we were smitten.
There’s no marker on the timeline of my accumulated years where I can pinpoint that moment when I could no longer lift eighty pounds of Quikcrete like I used to. Or the exact day when my left thumb grew more stiff and in need of coddling at the end of a long stretch of handwriting my memoirs. It’s never that precise, the aging process. It’s far more subtle and gradual when one’s muscles don’t quite lengthen the way they did during the Big Barn Cleaning of 2002 or the trimming of goat hooves when we kept a herd of forty-two (do the math on that one: four hooves per goat x forty-two and that’s a mighty lot of chasing after four-leggeds to wrassle them into the pedicure position). It’s easier to run through a list of the surgeries I’ve had and remember to send a Christmas card to each of my anesthesiologists. Let’s see…I’ve come through a tonsillectomy, wisdom teeth extraction, two stapedectomies to replace the stapes bones in both ears (with a platinum filament, no less. Ain’t I all fancy now?), brain surgery to remove a benign tumor on my skull, a total hysterectomy and treatment for Graves disease (not surgery, but I did get to drink radioactive iodine from a tiny brown bottle while sitting upright in a chair with a heavy lead apron that covered my torso. The nurses who administered the medicine made sure they were safely on the other side of the glass door to the treatment room before I raised the bottle to my lips and said a silent “bottoms up!”). Thyroid now shrunk into oblivion some twenty years later, I dutifully take my levothyroxine every morning as the sun rises through the bathroom window.
Living where we do is a daily physical commitment that needs our regular attention, and our bodies must show up in working condition. The projects themselves are enough to get our blood moving and our lungs expanding. Who needs a gym membership when you’ve got 41 acres of squats, overhead presses and ab crunches during the planting and harvesting ends of the season? Our mortgage payments ensure that we’re motivated to get the most of what this natural weight training program has to offer, and I stop just shy of saying we’re now sculpted in our 50’s. We’re not couch potatoes, but neither are we ripped. I’m grateful to make it around the paths by the woods and in the fields every morning no matter what precipitation falls on me and around me during those seventeen acre treks. I feel sturdy and alive. And that’s worth a tick mark in the achievements column of my life’s ledger.
We know that at some point, it’ll be the day’s big event to walk down to the barn to fire up the riding mower and cut the meadow’s two and a half acres of grass down to size. There will still be another eight acres to go but we’ll save that for the next day and hope it doesn’t rain before we get to it. We’ll be less fussy about keeping the weeds down around the house; as long as they don’t climb up the siding and obscure our view from the second floor window to the west, that’ll be fine. Of course, by then we may have moved the master bedroom to the first floor and will only venture upstairs to see what that snuffling sound is in the attic that’s almost empty now.
In some sort of cosmic paradox, this rural tenure of ours has both invigorated and aged us in equal measure. We’ve more lines and spots on our skin, that’s true. But we also take in every molecule of oxygen the trees put forth; it hits our bloodstreams like the tonic it’s meant to be. I feel more renewed than fatigued more days than not, and I relish those evenings when I’m exhausted from the days’ physical work rather than the “wired-tired” of too much mental stress. The difference as I drift off to sleep is decidedly distinct and I don’t even remember my dreams. Delicious.
Today began like most other days, with a walk around the land and a good bit of taking stock of the projects that await us when the winter melts into spring. This morning, though, I was determined to get a head start. When the trees are bare and the fields’ contents a transparent brown, it’s clear which thickets need cutting, which trees need to be freed of the grapevines that cling to their nubby bark and weigh down their upper canopies. I set my sights on a small group of black walnut saplings just on the other side of the meadow, draped in straps of grapevines swaying in the cold winter winds. My technique is fairly simple: cut the thicker section of vines that lie closer to the ground, then pull on the thinner dangling end of the vine above until it comes loose and cascades down past my ear-muffed head to the ground. All was going according to plan until I grabbed hold of a rather stubborn vine and gave it a mighty tug. I toppled backwards as the vine slipped out of my grasp and held fast to the sapling’s uppermost main branch, laughing my way to the ground in a soft tuck-and-roll maneuver. I could almost hear the nearby thorny blackberry stalks snickering as I lay there for a long minute, wondering if two falls in as many days was cause for concern. I sat up, fixed my gaze at the end of the grapevine still swaying above me and pushed myself off the ground to full standing position.
One of us was coming down, and it wasn’t going to be me.
