These are the days...

There are days I feel every day of my forties. I do not remember ever feeling every day of my twenties! I don’t remember feeling anything at 23, ask me what I feel at 41? Maybe that’s the beauty of youth, its’ numbness. You can’t actually feel a damn thing but you don’t care because you just did something incredibly stupid but hey, you bounced! Today. I am feeling very forty-one and un-bouncy...

Because I mowed the yard. Fine. I mowed the yard - with a manual push mower two days after I should have mowed the yard. If manual push mowers hate long grass they despise thick grass. My yard, thanks to recent rain and conditioned with several days of 345 percent humidity was both long and thick.

Mowing the yard made my arm hurt like a bad word because I banged it in the door at the Poverty Barn over the weekend - completely their fault! I would sue, but that could you sue Poverty Barn for? A thousand Haverty’s floor lamps and thirty cases of Israeli jam? and apparently what ever I banged gets used when I mow and it was pissed at me. At 23 I could have banged my whole body into a brick wall and it would have giggled and bounced off to something else stupid.

I should point out that my front yard meets the legal definition of “postage stamp” . At 23 I would have mowed the yard, watered everything, taken the dog for a walk and then came back and went to a party at 11pm. But at 23 I didn’t have a yard or anything to water or a dog... At 41 and in the present, before I got started with the mowing, I entertained some thoughts about post mow, pulling out the weed whacker to clean a few spots up but about a quarter of the way through the job with my hair wet and my clothes soaked though it became clear that I was probably not going to live that long.

Much to my shock, I did not die! and as a cool down, because I like to think of mowing with a push mower as a high impact work out, I watered everything I didn’t have to  mow.

I  realized something later, while I was walking the dog. Today I walked the dog three times, rode my bike over lunch, mowed the yard in 345 percent humidity, watered and tended my not unsubstantial gardens, went grocery shopping, prepared dinner for myself from mostly scratch and worked a full time job and then after all that I made some instant, just-add-water low fat blue berry coffee cake - well, it was low fat until I realized I had brown sugar and butter in my refrigerator as well as a several cups of frozen blue berries. I don’t have shite in my fridge but I can pimp my low fat, just-add-water coffee cake Not bad for 23, completely awesome for 41.