Stumped

I have spent much of the last few days clearing land around the house, and most of the clearing has involved the removal of small to middling-sized trees and their stumps. It is, I can now say from considerable firsthand experience, very hard work. I mean, really hard. I mean, soaked in sweat, panting, drink three quarts of water and your pee is still yellow, hard work. Cutting down the trees is, of course, the easy part. It's getting out the stumps that can be a bitch (no offense meant to the ladies). But, I did actually look up "stump removal" on the web and picked up a few tips the most important being - don't cut the tree flush to the ground, knucklehead! Leave a few feet to act as a lever that you can wiggle, hang on, push, etc. Duh. Such a small thing, but SO important. I also bought my new favorite tool - a pickaxe. Sometimes called a mattock, it's a fabulously effective tool, with the metal pick on one side and an axe-type end on the other side.

Anyway, I am now at the end of another clearing-day, exhausted but cleaned up by a long shower. And I got to thinking about the farmers who lived here a few hundred years ago, and how they had to clear the land. And not just for five hours a day for a couple of days, they had to bust their butts every day they could, and they were pulling out stumps a lot bigger than I was with the same kinds of tools and maybe a team of horses and maybe, I guess, if they were lucky, some dynamite. Farm life had - and still has - its joys, but it is hard, dirty, muscle-wrenching work, even today with power equipment. Imagine homesteading some piece of land that needed to be cleared, plowed, planted, harvested, and you were on your own, and you couldn't just "do it next year" because you'd be dead of starvation, or frozen because you didn't cut enough firewood if you put it off. We often have a different kind of stress than those hardy folk had, and it can be debilitating if we let it. Luckily - and I know that I am lucky - I can take off a few days and physically exhaust myself without needing to do it day in and day out.