As I was pushing the wheelbarrow up the hill I found myself contemplating other times my body has really ached. I suppose the most dramatic would naturally be when I broke my back. Fortunately, young bodies mend pretty quickly, and by this point that horror is all just like a passing whimsy, almost something that didn't really happen to me.
I remember, too, the brief period when I tried out for basketball in high school. We ran stair laps around the gym and by the end of the first week of practices I was pretty sure my legs were just going to fall off. Unfortunately, with that experience, I never had the chance to discover what it would feel like to actually become acclimated to that sort of training. I soon learned that, despite the fact that we were told there would be a freshman team and no one would be cut, it was clearly more important to have lived in the community for a long time, because I was cut and a girl who never came to the pre-practices ended up on the team. Curious, and rather doubly painful. But this post is not about failures, but about a slow and tedious triumph.
Perhaps "triumph" is a bit premature at this stage. We still have quite a lot of work to do before this little episode is complete, but right now my body is telling me I've definitely achieved something.
So here is what our project looked like in the beginning. We're trying to clear the dirt out of what will eventually be the greenhouse at the garden spot.
We started this work last Thursday, and at the end of that day had managed to dig out about the amount of a small grave. Keep in mind that beside the digging we then have a decently long haul up a hill to the place we have to dump all this conglomeration of dirt and rocks, so it's definitely a lot of work.
On Saturday, a week and a half after the project was begun, we came back and attacked it again. This time we started in the morning and managed to do about this much more.
I added the picture of me in the hole to give you some idea of just how much dirt we're really talking here. I'm beginning to feel like we're digging out a swimming pool.
Saturday we worked doubly hard. After a short lunch break we came back and tackled the hole once again. It's seriously body numbing sort of work. Mark takes a couple of massive wheelbarrows full, and then I take a couple of baby loads just so he can have a bit of a break.
Sunday we were back at it in the afternoon. This time we rotated his dad in for hauling the wheelbarrows as well, and that helped so that we weren't over pushing our already aching bodies. It might be a bit hard to tell just how much more we managed to get done in these last pictures here, but we totally undercut the ground under our ramp, so it is now a much smaller island. I'm not quite sure how we'll manage when we don't have the dirt for the ramp and have to just shovel to the outside, but we'll see what we can manage.
It's actually Monday morning here now, but I really wanted to publish a blog on 10-10-10 before I ran out of time. Rather a magical date after all, isn't it?
After our long day of work Mark and I went out for dinner. We've found a place close by that is fairly cheap and they make a pretty tasty "Mexican Tortilla." It doesn't exactly taste like Mexican food, but it's not bad. So we went out and filled up after all the hard work, topping it off with yummy fried apple rings. Then we went for a walk under the stars. It was super clear and no moon so it felt like we could see forever. A perfect end to a long hard day. Glorious. Cold, but glorious :)
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