The Honest Courtesan

Whenever people ask me if I “work out”, I reply, “If you mean, do I pay somebody to go to a building full of machines to exercise on, the answer is no.  But I own a farm.”  If you’ve been following my columns about building a new wing onto my house, you already know that I did the great majority of the work myself.  But even outside of that, even tiny little properties like mine (11 acres) require daily physical labor to maintain, and Grace is no longer able to help.  So mending things, hefting 50# sacks of animal feed, and the like tend to keep one in shape.  On Friday I hauled 26 bales of hay from the back of the barn to the front; the reason requires a little explanation.  I have an arrangement with one of my neighbors to let him store his hay and haying equipment in my barn, in exchange for all the hay my animals need plus occasional favor like using his bulldozer or tractor to do some small project; he also provided the gravel we used for the ground prep in the annex project.  Anyway, on Friday he swung by to tell me he’d removed the last of the hay he needed for the season, so I could have everything that was left.  That meant moving the bales from behind a barricade that keeps my animals out of his hay, to the front of the barn where they can get at it; as you can see, it didn’t take long for Jonathan to realize he could now eat as much of it as he liked.  In deep winter, he and Shiloh go through about a bale a week, but green shoots are already starting to appear, so I doubt they’ll finish more than 4 or 5 of these bales before spring arrives.  And that means once the grass stops growing come October, we’ve already got their food through most of next winter.  But that doesn’t mean I’ll lack exercise; there are too many sacks, bundles and other weights to tote hither and yon for me to remain idle for long.