Listen To Your Body

I saw a sign once that said "Everyone serves a purpose, even if it is only as a warning to others." It was funny at the time. I stopped laughing this morning. Here's my warning. When your body tells you that you've had enough, listen.

The morning was beautiful, and I could have just kicked back on the deck and enjoyed the scenery, but I figured it would be nice to be a little more productive. My irises are coming up nicely, but the grasses around them are coming up just as quickly. When you have over an acre, and it's foothill property, you don't just grab the lawnmower. You use a weed whacker. How hard could that be?

John has two of them. I asked him if I could use one, and told him I wanted to trim the areas around my flowers and the front deck around the fire pit. He, of course, offered to do it for me—not immediately, of course, but eventually. Naturally, I wanted it done sooner than that, so asked if he could just give me a little lesson and let me see what I could do. He picked the electric one, since it keeps going nicely and is the lighter of the two... not that I could tell after about fifteen minutes.

Within half an hour my forearms ached and my back was beginning to cramp. I was wondering how John managed to do so much yard at once. When he does it, he usually does half the yard in one morning, then finishes in the late afternoon when it cools down again. Sometimes he does it two mornings in a row. I took a look around me and saw that I had only cleared about a twenty by thirty foot area in thirty minutes, and managed to chop off one of my iris plants, too. John would never have done that, but my arms were shaking. 

I considered quitting. My body was really begging for it, letting me know I'd had enough. Then I saw one more patch that would "complete" a section. Well, I thought, that shouldn't take me more than another ten minutes. I made my way over to it, thinking that if I stood in one spot and swung the thing around my in an arc, I could clear a larger patch more quickly. Unfortunately, the patch I cleared was about three inches by five inches—skin from the calf of my leg. 

That's one way to get out of trimming the grass. John was pretty upset. He'd never heard of anyone hurting the back of their leg with a weed whacker before. Where there's a will, there's a way.