My Small but Faithful Readership may have figured out by now that it’s time for the pecan harvest, and I’ve been trying to gather what I can. (Incidentally, this looks like a poor crop year. I’ve only gotten about sixty pounds, where the crop two years ago—pecan trees only bear every other year—was 170 pounds.) The problem is that in order to find the nuts, I also have to rake the leaves under which the nuts hide.
This isn’t a Completely Bad Thing. Granted, the dust and pollen that I stir up while raking leave me with itchy eyes and blocked sinuses for a couple of days afterward. The raking itself, though, should count as aerobic activity, since I break a sweat after half an hour, and bending over to pick up nuts is like doing toe touches.
But there’s too much of a Good Thing, and I did it yesterday when I raked the front, back, and one of the side yards, leaving only a ten-by-thirty section of the other side yard undone. In three hours I piled up an absurd amount (“Yet who would have thought the old tree to have had so many leaves on him?”) in the compost pen, next to the compost pen, in the street gutters . . . .
And I overdid it in a big way. All the stretching and bending strained my back, to the point I was hurting at dinner last night, and REALLY hurting by this morning. Plumb miserable, it was. It took me half the morning to move today.
The bathroom scale says I’ve dropped a few pounds, I suppose from all the exercise of yardwork. But is it worth the after-effect of being stove up for a day or more?
Alley Oop eats the left Martian cat. Fnord.
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