Heavy Lifting

[poliphilo]

There's only so much heavy lifting I can do in a day. I've never had much stamina. Once- in my twenties- I tried to keep pace with a couple of young dudes on a Kentucky farm who were heaving great enormous hay bales onto a wagon in the torpid heat of a summer's day and it all but killed me.  I struggled through to lunch, then slunk away shamefacedly and did something ladylike instead. 

This morning I finished clearing out the kitchen cupboards. Then we took a load to the storage unit and I filled the last of the floor space there. After lunch we went up to Sainsbury's and I deposited six bags of books and videos in the Oxfam bin and bought some strong carrier bags. I've discovered I prefer bags to boxes when in comes to packing books; they're so much easier to carry.

Since then I've been sitting around, doing a crossword, dozing- and getting up once in a while to potter.

Comments

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Hay bales are also prickly. You end up with puncture marks all over your hands and forearms.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

Prickly, yes.

The worst of it, I think, is not picking them up in the field and heaving them onto the hay wagon; the worst is stacking bales in the loft, as they are thrown threw the mow. The heat is so oppressive up there, and the air so close, that one is tempted take off one's shirt and, when one does, little bits of dried grass stick to your sweaty skin and make tiny, stinging cuts.

Putting up hay is not much fun that way at all. My father has used either a stacker or round baler for twenty years, now, and it is not nearly so labor-intensive. Cutting and baling are okay. My favorite is tetting and raking hay. The repetitive motion, the smell of the drying grass, the sunshine, the whir of the equipment: I find it all delightfully hypnotic and peaceful.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I never got as far as the hay loft.

I'm not a country boy....

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

I am a country boy, sort of. Most every weekend of my childhood was spent on my grandparent's farms, about an hour away. I do not give it much thought, except when topics like this come up or, as happened recently, I was called upon to operate a tractor or repair a fence or hang a gate.

[oakmouse]

*nods* And with a long-term wheeze from breathing all of the bits.