A little manual labor...

It's strange how being removed from a profession which requires manual labor, leaves one missing the doing of it.

After taking care of a few basic housekeeping errands this morning, I met my neighbor out front of our complex. she was looking over the rocks that were placed there for decorative purposes several years ago, and to her lament, they were uncomfortably close to the japanese maple she had planted there ten years ago, and were in danger of having the tree trunk grow into them, causing the trunk to weaken and possibly crack and break eventually.

From previous experience, we knew that these rocks weighed more than a thousand pounds each, and weren't going to be moved easily.

So I thought back to our days of youth, and the memories of moving these rocks in my early twenties was tempered by my more recent memories of aching muscles and aching joints.

The idea of moving thousand pound rocks isn't one to be taken lightly, but I can't help but feel humbled by our old neighbor, Mr Smith, who upon retirement, began landscaping his yard, creating the pond we used to skate upon in winter. The boulders which lined this pond, had to have weighed much more than a thousand pounds each, and I would dare to say that some of them had to have weighed on the order of several tons each. Yet he managed to move them by himself, using only hand tools and simple machines.

So I told her, "Get me a pry bar and some wooden blocks" which she did, and to her amazement, I managed to get the rock out of the ground, and moved into it's new hole, leaving a good clearance of 18 inches between the nearest corner of the rock and the trunk of the tree.

Looking back on it, we hardly spent a half hour doing the labor involved, yet we both felt like a major endeavor was accomplished today, and our level of self satisfaction is much higher than had we rented a "Mighty Mite' front loader to lift the rocks, like she was anticipating.