Realization

The strain of my firewood cutting and hauling seven days a week keeps leaving me with an assortment of small pains and periods of exhaustion, and added to that is the stress of having to remember where I am and what I'm doing every second while I'm in the woods, especially whenever I'm holding a running chainsaw. And two weeks ago my wife caught me violating my own hard and fast rule of never operating a chainsaw on Sundays. I don't think I had ever done that before, but that day I had simply forgotten, and I stopped as soon as she yelled through the woods. I've never heard that rule stated as such, but I formulated and adopted it after having noticed that I never heard the locals running chainsaws on that day. Once in a great while I would hear a gunshot, usually only one, but never a saw.

Noting how those stresses and strains were leaving me feeling shaky and feeble most of the time, yesterday I got to thinking. Not many men born in 1931 or even years later are doing this kind of thing. So what right do I have to think I should be feeling just as I did thirty or forty years ago? Worse still, even then I wasn't the robust type, having always been underweight, maybe even severely so, never -- until about 20 years ago --weighing more than 135 pounds while standing just short of six feet tall. What right indeed! And that thought made me feel better, though I am not quite sure that it is the realization that I ought to be nursing.

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