Sore Muscles and Calluses

I try to tell myself it’s good to work hard, to teach my daughters to work hard. But we get tired and grouchy too and some days my head spins at the busy schedule. Some days I don’t know how to order my list of work. I try to recall the triage order and do the emergency tasks first. On a farm, the triage list can change as quickly as it can in an emergency room.

On Saturday I was feeling in a big rush because of the long list of spring work we’re trying to get done while caring for bottle calves and needing to plant potatoes in the garden and finish the fence lines. I’d neglected feeding my sourdough but we were out of bread and the whole family needed lunch. I stood in the bakery buying bread and saw the little cupcakes and the Mother’s Day sign and thought of an old friend just a couple blocks away who experienced lonely Mother’s Days even before she was in the nursing home. “Five minutes is all it would take, “ I told myself. “”I’ll drop off some tiny cupcakes for her.”

The lady behind the counter carefully boxed up the cupcakes and I wrote a little message on the gift box and in minutes I was looking for my friend among many older ladies who were sitting in wheelchairs or had walkers perched nearby. They were just sitting around quietly inside on a sunny (okay, it was smoky but the sun was shining behind the smoke) spring day while outdoors not far away farmers drove tractors seeding crops and tending cows and their young families worked themselves into tired worn out bodies each night.

I walked out of that nursing home after hearing about my friends old age aches and I felt alive and strong. Wonderfully alive and I added a special spring to my step as i walked through the big doors. My sore muscles came from running chainsaw and dragging trees and running a tiller. My hands were blistered and I had a mild black eye from an accident but I at least got a satisfied feeling with my pain. She just gets another day inside the nursing home with the same old aches. Sore muscles and calluses on my hands are blessings.

I saw all those Mothers in their late years just sitting bored inside on that lovely spring day and i know they’ve had their years of hard work and their grandchildren are somewhere working hard. I know they haven’t regretted their years of work either. I hope when i’m sitting in the nursing home i can look back and feel good at how used up and worn out I am. I want to feel deep satisfaction that I filled up my best years with hard work and family companionship.

I shall live gratefully these busy days. I’ll enjoy every morning cup of coffee before i head out to till garden. I’ll savour the couch piled high of clean laundry and revel in the fact that i’m strong enough to lift a chainsaw and carry a felled tree to the burn pile. I’ll enjoy each splinter that I get from caning raspberries. I’ll smile at the late supper hours because at least we’re not boring and over scheduled.

This is the best of life, these busy years with teens headed this way and that to their separate jobs and needing to make sure each child has food and drink and chores are all completed each day. When the bottle calf hides away I’ll enjoy the quiet time spent walking the bush looking for it. I can walk, I can run. Praise God I’m alive.

My garden spade will break off and the mower won’t start and the weed whacker will quit but I can keep going in my praise filled life because the list of work never ends and there is something for me to do. In the breaks there are footballs to throw with a boy, baseballs to run after, and a large octopus kite to fly that i seem to enjoy the most. On Mother’s Day we had a relaxed afternoon playing outside together and came home to work at our animal chores. A lot of the time, working together is just as happy as our play together. It might be hard to get everyone going, but we end up with such happy conversation at the supper table . A bit more work and it’s bedtime and we sleep to have another busy day the next day. The struggle to keep order in the hectic life is real but at least we’re struggling and not sitting in a chair in a ordered and sterile nursing home.

Maybe when I’m old I’ll go senile and I can just live in the busy years instead of realizing i’m stuck in a chair inside a nursing home eating lunch at 11:45 and supper at 5:00. Maybe my grandchildren can pile their laundry on my bed for me to fold. Maybe I can smile when I see how my eyelids hang down and remember all the black eyes I’ve given myself with a stuck vacuum cleaner hose or a falling tree. Maybe, just maybe, I can continue a praise filled life if I keep the habit going strong today.