WHEW!

And when your back stops aching
 And your hands begin to harden ...
You'll find yourself a partner in the Glory of the Garden
~Rudyard Kipling~

Whew!  What a week!  For those that don't know my story, my husband and I live in two different states.  About five years ago, he purchased this little cottage for me  after noticing that my asthma always improved when I visited my mother in Michigan.  Romantic isn't it?  It was and still is, a very humble abode and our intention was just for me to live in it during the summer.  But along the way, my health improved so much and I fell in love with this quirky little village, so we decided it would be best for me to stay on and work at improving this  little bungalow with the goal of making it a retirement home for the two of us.  Why didn't we find a place that the two of us could live in together?  Unfortunately, chemical companies are never located in bucolic areas, and my husband is a very remarkable chemist.   Anyway, to make a long story short, my dear husband has been here for the entire week.  It has been a sort of preview of what the retired life will be like with my old sweetheart. All I can say is that I'll never be bored!

On day one, he noticed a truck with a load of  firewood parked at the farmer's market. " Doesn't that look like a bit much?" I dared to ask.  "No just a couple of cords.  It's not too much."   he replied.  So the next thing I see is a big old truck dumping tons of firewood on our driveway.  Sometime after stacking the fourth or fifth cord, he finally admitted it was a tad bit more than he thought.  Since we only use our woodstove to take a chill off or in emergencies, I think the wood will probably rot before we  use it all.  But you'd have to meet my dear husband to understand that his credo is "more is more!" .  When he insulated the attic, he bought enough insulation for the Biltmore estate, not a 1000 square foot cottage.

Day two was time to get the rest of the garden planted. Long, hard, and hot work but eight hours later our garden looks like an illustration out of a Beatrix Potter book.  He even made an adorable twiggy trellis for the beans.  A weed-free vegetable garden with its straight rows of greenery is a thing of beauty indeed!

The next day we rearranged our bedroom.  Living in such tight quarters, we are always experimenting with ways to maximize the space, and a new arrangement was badly needed.  While the room was in such disarray, he noticed that I had a lot of things stored under the bed.  So he organized everything into plastic bins and labeled them.  When I mentioned that there was no room to store them, he rearranged the attic!  One of the most wonderful things about my husband, is that he is one of the hardest workers, you'll ever meet.  When other women complain about how hard it is to get their husband off the couch and do something around the house, I can never relate.  Mention that the walls need washing and he'll have the room cleared of all the furniture, the walls washed, and while we're at it might as well give them a new paint job, quicker than you can say "Jack Robinson".

The rest of the days were a kind of blur. There wasn't a waking moment that some machine, be it a rotor tiller, lawn mower, weed whacker,  a chainsaw or drill wasn't being used.  After he left this morning, I sat and listened to the birds.  It was the like the calm after the storm.  My husband looks like Teddy Roosevelt, as a matter of fact, we used to have a picture of Teddy hanging in our hallway and when people stopped by we would tell them that was Ran's grandfather.  The always remarked that the looked exactly alike.  Then we would laugh and let them in on the joke.  People always wrote that Teddy was a human dynamo, a machine in perpetual motion.  If I believed in reincarnation, which I don't, I would seriously believe that I am married to Teddy, reincarnated!