There aren't many things that really get to me, but having work done by others on my property ranks right up there. From the time they clamber out of their pickup trucks to the time they leave for the day, I'm in full vigilante mode, peering between closed blinds and hiding in the shadows.
But after a while of watching the work clandestinely, I can't stand it anymore. All the clanging and banging makes me too nervous to just sit. I have to do something physical. So I jump into my yard clothes and spend time busying myself around the lot weed-whipping everything to death even if it doesn't need it, or mowing, or my latest exercise machine: hauling rock.
See, when we got the house seventeen years ago, the screened patio had a pool surrounded by chattahoochee and river rocks around the pool edge, with a big river rock fountain at the far end. This might have looked quite exotic if we had an outdoor pool surrounded by lush vegetation, but inside, with nothing but ferns and leafy big philodendrons, it looked out of place. So when we decided to resurface the badly eroded pool and pitted chattahoochee patio all at once, and the contractor offered to tear out the fountain for an extra $300, as well as the river rocks around the pool we had contracted for, we said yes.
Perhaps I should have asked for more detail. It turns out the price didn't include hauling them away, just removing them. They all got "removed" into a big heap against my outside bedroom wall, and it was up to me to do something with them.
Well, there was my excercise machine. Every day I'd go in and teach in the morning while the workers jabbered and clunked and banged around on my pool and patio, then when I came home I'd jump into my yard clothes and start in hauling that rock pile around the property with my lawn tractor and yard cart. And I placed a couple of hundred river rocks weighing from about fifteen or twenty to over sixty pounds each around every tree, hedge row, walk and cranny all over my property.
This was my stress response. Selye said years ago that nature's response to danger or fright or stress is to "fight or flight," but when one is stressed and does nothing to either fight or run away, bad things happen. I can't sit in my fortress while the huns batter the gates and hurl flaming projectiles over the ramparts. I've found hauling fifty-pound river rocks till I'm dog-tired to be just about right.
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2 comments:
You've got enough sneaky peeky cams to keep you out of the shadows..... and it that's not enough, you can rewind the tape and watch it all over again!
I can't believe they wouldn't take the river rocks. You COULD put some in the canal (think of it as a "habitat enrichment project" for the city's waterways).
He couldn't put them in the canal, I WANTED them. They look really great around the yard AND it would have been really expensive for us to have bought rock.
We did hide. The ladies would knock on the sliders and 'so sorree, but could we have.......'.
The guys worked pretty quietly and laughed, but the ladies would talk and talk and talk.....in Spanish. It was exhausting.
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