Posts Tagged ‘property chores’
Good Life
We woke yesterday morning with a glee hangover from our amazing David Byrne show Monday night, and it lingered throughout the day. Blessed with a fabulous climate-warmed summery-feeling November morning, we danced our way through the woods with Asher before approaching the barn to feed the horses.
We found the mares luxuriating in the emerging sunlight and mellow as ever. It got me thinking about how they stand so stoically to endure the miserable conditions when the weather is gruesome, as if they are aware that it never lasts, and that there will eventually be rewarding days like this as compensation.
Lately, mornings as nice as this one was –when the horses are calmly munching their feed and the natural world is as peaceful as ever– serve as a balm, soothing and comforting us. Coming on the heels of our evening of super special entertainment, it felt like we were getting a double dose of feel-good medicine.
Asher seemed to be enjoying the unusually nice weather as well, and it had him romping playfully all over the place. When I decided to try raking some leaves, he behaved like I was making piles for him to race through and kick all over the place.
For what I hope is the last time this year (never say never), I got out the riding mower to mulch the leaves in the backyard grass. Most of the trees that drop leaves have finished doing that, so it seemed like a reasonable time to finish tending to the grass in back.
When I put the mower back in the garage, I moved the ATV to the front and parked the mower behind it, a symbolic gesture in anticipation of the change from mowing season to snowplowing season.
After that, I started picking off little nuisance tasks that had been nagging at me for a while. I drove my car to the shop garage to put air in the tires. Then I brought our three most-used wheelbarrows up from the barn to inflate tires on those. I attached a recently purchased battery manager to the diesel tractor battery. It instantly kicked into “charging” mode. That tractor doesn’t get driven enough to keep the battery charged.
Cyndie cleaned and mended horse blankets. I moved a fresh batch of hay bales from the shed into the barn. We moved her picnic “door table” and chairs from beneath the big oak tree in the woods into the barn for winter storage.
Working outdoors felt like we’d been given a gift to accomplish all these things on such a pleasant weather day. With all of our animals showing irrepressible joy and contentment, it felt like we were living the (really) good life.
If only I could train my brain to retain the sense of this goodness with more weight than it does with the challenging days of harsh weather and difficult problems, I would be ever so grateful. That would be living an even better life.
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Slow Progress
Yesterday, despite mighty intentions to tackle many tasks, I lowered my expectations to match my level of energy. To start, I decided to complete the prior day’s effort to shape up the old manure compost area. The chickens were thrilled to see me.
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It was low-hanging fruit, so to speak.
I had intended to do some chainsaw tasks that I’ve been saving for when I wasn’t home alone, but a power tool with a sharp blade was more than I wanted to be managing this day. In fact, the leaning pine tree stump I was going to trim back suddenly offered an alternative solution of being pushed back upright with a hydraulic jack.
Some spur-of-the-moment ideas don’t always pan out. The extra effort toward that side-project was only successful in avoiding doing something else. I think it is going to take the come-along winch to ultimately accomplish that task, but we decided to save it for another time.
From there, we headed across the field to try digging in the footbridge. That was another project which morphed into an adaptation somewhere between the ideal I had in my mind and the reality of what could be easily accomplished in a short amount of time with tools we could carry.
It ended up a perfect example of “good enough.”
That is a pretty good description of my whole day yesterday. It is something for which I have no complaints.
Slow progress is better than no progress at all.
Still healthy, 97.2°, and happily sheltering at home for the weekend with an amazing chef and companion. No complaints whatsoever, indeed.
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Relative Something 