Juvenescent energy struck K this spring. Not that we are old, we are still quite young, but he has had the energy of a teenager that is invincible to any sort of force that might slow him down. At this exact same moment, my body struck me down and crippled me the moment I went outside, fighting the pollen that coated everything in a fine film and left my immune system over-reacting, attacking my body…aka allergies.
I am lucky, my allergies hit hard but they only last 2-3 weeks and then I am fine. In those two weeks…really only 3 days during those 2 weeks, K managed to build the path that we have been talking about building since last spring. We had debated, discussed, talked in circles, and walked through what we wanted to do with the path. Turns out, more often than not we were saying the same thing…differently.
Well, while I was stuck indoors, trying not to anger the allergy beast, K got at it. The first half of the path he hammered out in a few hours. Once he got started he made amazing progress. I couldn’t believe how much earth he moved in the first day…all while fighting the cursed juniper trunks that randomly still run through our ground, generally exactly where we would like to dig down a few feet. K transformed into a human bulldozer and got started on something I still couldn’t wrap my head around.
- Spring 2017 – Beginning of permanent path
The next portion was just the same. I was out visiting family and while I was out I received a few text messages from K. They were of his progress. He had now gone completely across our yard in one major pathway. Something I figured would take a week solid of digging every night, took him 2 nights of digging.
Now I am sure you are wondering about his back. You’d think with the amount of earth he had moved, that his body would be groaning, grumbling and generally giving him hell for thinking he was 15 again….but no. He said he felt like he had a good workout, but was not overly sore or strained. I guess I am just out of shape…or aging at a much faster rate! I can honestly say that my body would definitely have revolted at the sheer amount of work he did in such a short time.
I cannot express how amazing the transformation was, and the pictures definitely do not do justification in how much work went into digging that path.
The last bit, the u-turn to the main portion of our yard he did after work in a few hours. We now have a safe path to take the cart up and down without hurting ourselves. Although still a hill, it is much safer if one of us needed to take a load up or down while the other was not available to help.
Apparently once I was out of the picture, no longer over-analyzing how it will work, how it will look, etc, K just got to work and got it done. Sometimes the ability to visualize is not helpful and it takes just getting the shovel in the ground and to get going and see how it turns out. I am HUGELY appreciative that K managed to get the whole path carved out and ready to put in our retaining walls. It was a task I was not really looking forward to doing (building stuff is my thing), and it is nice to see how the rest of our yard is going to come together now that the main path is in place.
We will need to work on our retaining wall, which we plan to have completed by the fall. More rocks to haul, more cages to fill, but a new system should make this task a little easier. We are going with a smaller grid wire, which will allow us to use baseball size rocks rather than large rocks. This means less organization of the rocks and careful placement and more dumping of buckets. I like the idea of just dumping some loads into the cages. They will fill a whole lot faster! Also, instead of building individual cages, we are making one long fence with a pocket between posts for the rocks to go. This is where I will be more helpful as it is more interesting to me than the digging part.
We can also now start seeing how the other paths will fit, and how the beds will look once we are done. Hopefully none of the other digging throws out K’s back!
JK Building The Dream 