I’m entertaining a 24-hour bug this weekend, which is taking all of my spare time. So, I leave you with this one from the archives.
“If you want to know what the world looked like after the deluge, visit a barton (barnyard) in the winter.” From the book, “We Make a Garden” by Margery Fish. At least that is the quote as I remember it, because some (former!) friend has purloined my copy (or I’ve possibly mislaid it).
A couple of nights ago, after securing the sheep, I stepped out the front door of the barn to survey our modest kingdom. A couple of cold weeks, with heavy rains, had left a slurry of frozen mud and muck at the entrance. The laying down of straw helped the situation in the short term but made it worse in the long term. The straw served as a deceptive floating island on the sea of mire.
This island, I was instantly aware, while beginning the survey of said kingdom, would not support my modest two-hundred pound frame. A frame launched, “slipping the surly bonds,” for brief moments before gravity pulled it back to earth in a long slide, only a hay bale intervening to slow its progress.
Funny how dignity attempts to reinstate itself in the most unlikely of situations. There I was with a solid streak of mud caked on one side of body from ear to calf and I bound up out of the muck as if nothing had happened, I’m sure, for the benefit of the watching sheep and pigs.
Well there is nothing dignified about a grown man stripping down to his birthday suit on the front porch, temperature thirty-four degrees, before being allowed entry. But thanks to a capacious hot-water tank, this farmer was able to reemerge minutes later with an acceptable standard of hygiene.
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Reading this weekend: Irresistible: the rise of addictive technology and the business of keeping us hooked (Adam Alter).
”… entertaining a 24-hour bug this weekend…” Wow, Southern Hospitality seems to have gone to another level. Paint me impressed. Still, I am sorry to learn of the predicament, and we wish you all the best as you weather the storm.
On the matter of dignity in the face of a sudden assault on balance and/or cleanliness: I might observe, based on experience from a position of advanced age, there will soon develop, within the nimble brain, a forlorn appreciation for pain…. piling on to one’s long experience the fact that one heals more slowly as time on this planet accumulates. If the matter comes to a choice between a dignified (albeit risky) response to a sudden unknown, and the less dignified, but much safer sprawl… the mind will very swiftly and demandingly rule in favor of safety – dignity be damned. Put another way – to the adolescent mind, pain is a curiosity and dignity a matter of pride. But to the long tested body these roles are far less apparent.
Fortunately mud, while messy and difficult to remove, is somewhat forgiving on the pain frontier. Black ice comes at us differently.
Nicely put, Clem. I’m taking notes.
Are you sure that this is just a question of age? I come from a family where ailments get cured mostly by waiting for them to get better, irrespective of the person’s age. Weeks, even months pass as certain pains are accepted as part of life, until they subside.
But yes, there’s all sorts of people around us who can’t wait for that fracture to heal so they can go waterskiing in Vietnam two weeks from now.
Perhaps age is not the only consideration. It appears impossible to me to do the experiment where I travel backwards in time with a particular bodily insult to see whether age alone is the culprit. But I would also observe that the body does seem to track certain insults – the more significant ones anyway. A broken bone, once healed serves its purpose again, but future events seem to call first upon the breaks and compromised bits ahead of the parts not previously impaired. So age is in a sense more than the mere passing of time — it is also a physical registry of prior experience.
I would agree that some discomforts are better handled with age – in this I’m thinking of colds or flu symptoms where the experience of age and the “comfort” of knowing that ‘this too will pass’ can help one deal with the malady.
But on simple matters of field work where I exert a similar degree of effort compared to my much younger coworkers (and to what I would have done myself twenty years ago) – I tend to find my recovery time much extended these days. I blame this primarily on age – though a case can be made that I’ve not striven to maintain my fitness as much as I should. I’ve also observed that I spend much more effort on finesse when doing physical chores. I’m far less likely these days to simply try and force something when a tool or a lever can be found in a reasonable time. Expedience gives way to experience… so as to avoid a potential pain as much as anything.
You’re right of course. I should have put this differently: From a very young age I got taught that things take time. I still don’t drive. And injuries were included in that – you didn’t take a pill, you waited for things to get better. Which they did.
And I still get fitter with age. Not too difficult, given my shift of focus to spend my time doing more and more manual work. We recently handled someone’s emergency change of residency with two people. Nice workout. Will be handling more and more crates of apples in the future. Should probably be buying bigger sized shirts.
Dignity. Reminds me of the cat that falls off the couch and immediately starts preening itself, as if to say, “I was simply jumping off, not falling. Was there ever any doubt?”
Clem and Michael,
A fun series on bookstores over at the Front Porch Republic: https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2019/02/the-american-bookstore-a-list/
Cheers,
Excellent referral kind sir… I particularly liked her noting in the final entry (her #1 pick): “… while the back of the store stocks classics and relies on the surrounding community of professors to preserve rarities that would otherwise disappear.” I think this is what’s going on at the Half Priced Books on Lane Ave. in Columbus. There are several HPBs here, and only one other comes close in terms of rare old goodies. The Lane Ave store is only a few blocks from the OSU campus and in a neighborhood full of faculty. Go figure.
Ann Arbor is just a day trip for this correspondent… though if I were to drive there I’d need to cover up the license plates before parking anywhere near the campus.
One wonders whether she might be persuaded to evaluate private libraries among the readership @ FPR… then we could get on with the Agrarian book throw down. Just a thought.
I remain confident in the unbiased verdicts of the SRA editorial committee on that topic. No need to bring in unknown outside agitators.