25 Bales

It's a start. 25 bales were delivered today and put up in the freshly cleaned-out and opened spaces in my small barn. I have another 175 to go to feel content going into winter, but if I can swing a weekly order of 25 for $145 and keep putting them up - I will get there by October. It felt good, regardless of the amount, to be stacking hay in the barn. I was dripping with sweat but smiling like a wolf. Winter will come and slowly I will get ready for her.

Between running, barn mucking, and stacking wood and hay bales I end my days with a cold shower, sore muscles, and a nervous but content smile. I am learning to appreciate my body in a new way. I used to curse and despise myself for not looking like the tall, thin, brunette Carhartt models in the magazines. Not being like those women who managed to look stunningly feminine and beautiful in a loose braid with a bale over their shoulder. Now I know the braids are extensions, the images and photoshopped, and the bale is a prop that weighs fifteen pounds. Their job isn't to do my work. It's to look good pretending to do it.

But this little hobbit body! HOO! This body woke up and ran five miles in a heat wave. It moved hundreds of pounds of muck with a pitchfork. It stacked a quarter-hundred bales. It carried 80lbs of water a turn, uphill, over and over, and did it all for me and my dreams. I may be fifteen pounds heavier than I was this time last summer, but I am fifteen times happier. Part of that is also ending my day patting cellulite and telling her she's a very good girl.