Walk like an...

...for Knots in the String

I write this on Tuesday and I sit with an ice pack draped over my right shoulder.

It’s about 6 hours since ballet class which, I might add, I loved. Every minute unlocking the tight soreness of a strenuous previous week. Later, I walked the dog and pursued the mundane. But as the day progressed, my shoulder began to painfully burn, worse when my arm was required to work!

I swear it’s not due to ballet at all.

Let me explain:

Last week, husband and self decided we would do some landscaping in the farm garden, to make it easier to manage. We weeded and pruned the long border, pulled out anything that wasn’t hardy, fed, and then mulched with lucerne straw that husband barrowed from the ram paddock where the big wooly chaps had slept in it, poo-ed and wee-ed in it and made it perfection for garden beds.

So far so good. Tired, but bodies coping.

More demanding jobs – tree felling and wood-hooking, spreading blue metal gravel under the 100 year old hawthorn and the equally elderly prunus. And that, my friends, I’m sure was the start of the sore shoulder. Gravel is unforgiving, immovable stuff and required raking with the back of a metal rake, pulling it toward me. Husband barrowed, I raked. All 3 tons of it!

Our working days were glorious – a cloudless, infinitely blue sky (no meaningful rain) with the ewes and rams bleating as they lazily picked their way across the lucerne fields. When we noticed them moving up the slopes to the highest spots in the paddocks, we knew without looking at the time that dusk was approaching as sheep will always camp nightly on high ground where they feel safe.

Daily, we were joined by the tiniest brown wrens, willy wagtails and scarlet robins who pecked at whatever seeds and worms we dislodged, we were serenaded by magpies, kookaburras laughed at our efforts and massive flocks of white cockatoos wheeled up and down the valley looking for grubs. In between their feeding frenzies, they would sit in trees, screeching at us until I began to answer back. The astonished peace in response was short-lived…

We sat on the porch eating lunch each day, surveying our work and as he chewed his ham sandwich (@SueSutherlandWood – sigh), in one of those bucolic moments my husband had an idea.

By the side of our bottom dam, there had been an old shepherd’s hut. When the dam was extended and repaired, the decrepit shed was dismantled and removed. The convict-made bricks from the chimney were stacked and there was a massive carved sandstone lintel/entry stone. This was rescued and left near the barn paddock fence, waiting for someone to have the energy to move it into a garden, any garden, as a feature.

Apparently, despite tons of blue metal gravel, barrow loads of heavy manured lucerne mulch and chopped-down trees, my husband decided we had the energy…

That evening, he worked out the weight of the lintel (250kgs) and then puzzled over moving it from the paddock behind the barn, 1/3^rd of a kilometre to the garden beneath the pink hawthorn and the deep pink prunus.

I said to him, ‘You know, the Egyptians had the right idea. It’s said they built the pyramids using rollers.’ His face lit up. Bingo! We would use the tractor and forks to get the slab as far as the garden gate and then we would use old fence posts as rollers to get it where we wanted.

The next day, reality set in. We had just one chance to position the stone. If it went off-piste at all, we could never get it back to where it should be without a host of Egyptian slaves.

You ask why we couldn’t use our big lettuce-green Claas tractor? Because it wouldn’t fit around the corner between the border and the veggie gardens, nor would it fit under the two trees. So it was manual labour or nothing.

We also noted the slight downhill gradient where the rollers might pick up speed. In addition, the lintel had to be supported by two carved sandstone blocks.  There are many on the farm – most of the buildings that were burned in the 1967 bushfires were of beautiful golden sandstone and so my husband barrowed in two blocks and with careful measuring, placed them in the desired spots.

Then came the moment.

The tractor carried the slab to the garden gate and it was lowered theatrically on top of the rollers. My husband dashed from the tractor to the front of the slab to slow its rolling pace as I picked up the back roller (my God, they weighed a ton!) and raced in front of him to lay it, then back to get another and so forth until we stopped, just behind the blocks, the lintel exactly where we hoped it would be.

So far so heavy…

My husband used a crowbar to lever one end of the stone up whilst I placed wooden blocks underneath the crowbar to increase the leverage. With a slight nudge, one end of the slab dropped into the right place!

Then the other end’s leverage began and in order to get it to the right height, husband had me stand on the end of the crowbar whilst he positioned the slab. I had visions of the crowbar flicking me up through the hawthorn canopy into the cloudless blue as bush ravens cawed around me and the resident pair of wedge-tailed eagles swooped down the slope we call the Ski Run to warn me out of the skies.

There was the grating sound of stone on stone – just like the sound of the Arc of the Covenant in Indiana Jones, and the slab slipped into its perfect place.

High five! Egyptian style!

This became my husband’s seat – Dad’s seat, Dad’s throne, because it was his idea to use the 100 year old stone that we know was chiselled by convicts. But we must divine the rest of its history. Was it a lintel over the fireplace that warmed the shepherd’s hut? Did the shepherds stew mutton, onions, potatoes, carrots and swedes, over the fire after a full day with the sheep? Or was it the stone from the entrance to the burned-down stables close by - the deep groove from years of the heavy steps of Clydesdales and men.

So he and I sat together under the trees, looking down the valley to the vineyards, the vine leaves sliding from chartreuse to amber. Around us, the prunus leaves fluttered to our aching feet and the petite birds chirruped in cut-glass tones. All we needed then, was the seal of approval from our offspring when they returned from the wilds of South Aotearoa- New Zealand’s glaciers.

There’s still work to be done (stones removed, corten steel edging, more olive tree hedging, a few specimen trees etc) but when we look at what we accomplished together (we aren’t exactly spring chickens!), we’re a little bit chuffed. My husband in his numerical way ( because I think I suffer from Dyscalculia ) worked out that we shifted 4500+ kgs of ‘stuff’ over 6 days.

Goodness!

Go us!

Music this week?

This of course: