Summer Suffering

It’s early summer at Uncannery Row, and Ray and I worked on the yard all last weekend, our own memorial to anyone who’s ever loved & tended a little piece of land. We got the vegetable garden mostly in and mulched it with landscape fabric and straw. We planted new perennials, yellow’s to offset my propensity toward a monochromatic purplish-blue. We mowed, weed-whacked, trimmed, pruned. We cleared brush by the Tower, and Ray cut down a few trees to improve the meditation/mower paths. Finally, Ray put together the new patio furniture, so we could sit and survey our labors on Monday.

After we’d surveyed for a bit with a nice glass of Malbec, I discovered I was no longer able to move. It was as if a mysterious force had, while I sipped my wine, replaced everything under my skin with cement. I was a cement sausage.

I used to think “hamstring” was cotton twine wrapped around a nice honey-glazed chunk of smoked pork. Apparently, hamstrings are muscles, angry and spiteful, that I had rudely awakened. Who’d’a thunk. So I spent most of last week downing Advil, sitting on a heating pad, and playing ring-toss with dog food, trying to fill the dishes without bending over.

In addition to suffering this muscle-revenge pain, I’m always a little anxious this time of year about the Peeling Off of Layers. This is a South Dakota phenomenon whereby people, signaled by the appearance of annuals in the Hy-Vee parking lot, start to strip. First it’s the parka (seriously…we had snow in early June last year), then the jacket, then the sweater, then the long pants, then the shoes & socks, etc., until most folks are wearing a tiny sundress, cargo shorts and a muscle shirt, teensy little hotpants and a spaghetti-strap tank, or just a strip of cloth and an expensive tan.

The annual Peeling makes me anxious on two counts: (1) no part of me will ever again fit into anything described as “teensy”, “little” or “mini”. Clothing that looks adorable and chic on hangers, magically transforms into oddly-angled rippling, bulging distortions of color and pattern on my body; and (2) I am a white girl. By that I mean that I am not just pale or not-tan, I am glow-in-the-dark white. And I have freckles that sharpen, darken, and multiply in the sun until I look like an aging Opie Taylor, if Opie was overweight, had long braids, and occasionally wore a skirt.

Ray and I will be back at it again this weekend, mowing, weeding, and planting bleeding heart, black raspberries, and trumpet vines. I’m starting the Advil and Tiger Balm now, and I’ll be mowing later, smeared with SPF 10,000, in my long-sleeved flannel shirt, overalls, a safari sunblocking hat, work boots, and garden gloves. If you drive by, please, try not to honk & laugh...it disturbs the nesting peahens.