It’s Raining, It’s Pouring
Here we are in the middle of August and I’m putting on extra clothes for warmth. That’s right, its turned suddenly downright chilly on the hilltop at 62 degrees. It will be in the 90’s again next week, so I’m just going to enjoy it. Naturally, this was the day I planned for a team of laborers under the direction of Handy Brad to lay out the DG paths and spread the three yards of bark mulch. What started as a light morning mist, which would usually burn off by now, has turned into an outright steady rain shower, not a downpour, but a steady drizzle. While the team humped wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of first bark mulch and then DG down the hillside, I went about weeding where the two products were going to be laid down. Logically, but unanticipated, the weeding was much easier when the ground is moist. It’s easier because the weeds stand out against the earth and are much easier to spot and secondly, the pull right up when the soil is wet. It reminds me just how dry and powdery the hillside soil is around here. Poor Handy Brad is trying to use a gas-powered tamper to prepare the pathway and I can hear him across the hillside cursing a blue streak since the dirt just keeps compacting more and more and seems to have no end to it. I have noticed when walking the hillside that occasionally my foot will sink in up to the ankle for no apparent reason. I always think it must be a gofer hole, but the truth is that the dryness just takes so much substance out of the soil that it compacts very easily. Occasionally it looks like I’m leaving footprints on the tundra.
After a few hours of weeding, my gloves are soaked, my shirt and shorts are soaked and my feet inside my Crocs are undoubtedly surrounded by mud in between my toes. That’s quite an image and its not exaggerated. I tend to look like Pigpen with a cloud of dust over my head when I go out onto the back hillside. This morning is no different except that when you take a coating of dirt and add rain to the recipe, I have become a real live mud puddle of a homeowner. Brad and the team are just working through it as though it beats hot sun. I admire the outdoor working man for his grit and stamina. After those few hours of getting soaked and muddy, I must admit I find myself asking myself what in the hell I think I’m doing. There is supposed to be some benefit accruing to me for forty-five years of hard long hours and the abuse taken by anyone affiliated with Wall Street (just on principle). So I go around and take lunch orders to justify my bailing from the rainy hillside. It gives me a chance to go in and change my soaked clothing, take a shower where 90% of the scrubbing is happening on my feet and then go for a leisurely drive into town while catching up on my MSNBC news.
Over the past year I have learned that its wrong to assume that my day laborers want Mexican food just because they are Mexican (or at least Central American). Whenever I have suggested tacos or whatnot, they undoubtedly ask for In-and-Out Burger or Panda Express. Today when I asked, they surprised me by saying Quesadilla con carne asada and Burrito California. Even Handy Brad was game for a cheese Quesadilla. I asked if they liked Alberto’s grub and they wholeheartedly agreed they thought it was the best fast food Mexican around. I had concluded that on the occasions when I found Taco Bell closed, but Alberto’s right next door and wide open for business. You see, I go to Taco Bell when I’m on my own, because I prefer American Mexican to real Mexican and American Chinese (Panda Express) to real Chinese (all that leachy nut and gooey seafood stuff). So I went to Alberto’s and got $40 worthy of high quality Mexican food made in quantities for the hard-working Mexican day laborer. My boys scarfed it down while telling me about where they were from in southern Mexico. What I have come to believe is that whenever these guys say they are from Oaxaca or Chiapas (the far southern provinces of Mexico), what they really mean is that they are from Guatemala or Honduras. I guess everywhere in the world has its pecking order and in Central America it is better to say you are Mexican rather than one of the other struggling countries in the region. I think they assume that Anglo Americans have more respect for Mexicans than, say, Guatemalans, when, in my case, having spent a fair bit of time in the region as a child and as an adult, I have no such predisposition.
After lunch the gang just has to finish up one path, take down my newest plants and my two spectacular new driftwood trunks (artful stumps dried and on display at my favorite garden center). One of those stumps is easily three hundred pounds and very irregularly shaped, so hard to handle. They accomplish those tasks with me looking and directing the placement form the prime viewing spot on the deck. I have shifted gears with the gang. In the morning I was pulling weeds and prepping the turf for the bark mulch and DG, piling rock and setting things up for the heavy lifting team. This afternoon I am dressed and looking much more Padron-like or at least supervisory. I like to think of myself as versatile, but what its really about is stamina or my lack of it. Handy Brad is only one year younger than me and he has COPD and Glaucoma and is getting cataract surgery on Tuesday (my eyes are still fine), but he does know how to pace himself to work a more-or-less full day. If he starts at 7am, which is the case when he’s engaging laborers, he’s pretty done-in by 2pm, but I fade at 10-11am and am ready for the showers. I don’t feel bad about that, I am getting good exercise out there every day on that hillside, but I’m just glad I don’t have to earn my living like my team does. Thank God I’ve learned how to use my brain more than my brawn to earn my living. I like hard yard work, but I just can only do so much without needing a rest.
The other day, after working on the hillside for the day, I got on the scale for some reason and saw that I have lost another five pounds. I know that frustrates Kim, but here’s the thing, I’m earning it. I go out without breakfast most mornings and put in 2-3 hours or hard physical workouts-like yard work. I’ve done the math and know that the heavier I am, the more calories I burn lugging this mass up and down the hills. The only problem with all this exercise is that it’s overworking my hamstrings, which are tightening up to epic levels and then verging on cramping every night. Nothing like a hamstring charliehorse to get you up and awake. I’m trying to drink more water and even drink some Gatorade every evening, anything to avoid that dreaded twitch that leads to a sudden inner thigh seizure that makes me see stars. It strikes me as strangely symmetrical that in a world thirsty for sufficient water, my body is also desperate for sufficient fluids to keep me going up and down the back hillside. The universe is encouraging me to keep doing what I’m doing by lightening the scales for me and motivating me, but just like the old adage, when it rains, it pours. And here’s the real punch line, it’s raining and it’s pouring and the old man is snoring (even a bit with my CPAP), but the next two lines are more troubling since “he went to bed and bumped his head, and couldn’t get up in the morning.” In the time of Mother Goose, that meant that neurologically, that guy experienced an accidental death. I think I will be more careful on the rocky hillside…especially in the rain. I only want to lose a little weight after all, not all of it.