When the Shepherd Goes Down

I'm sure you've all heard that saying about walking a mile in another person's shoes to truly appreciate what it's like to be him. Well, today I had to step into A.'s shoes.

Or rather, muck boots.

He's sick with a cold. That's not debilitating, obviously, just a pain. But what IS debilitating is the shoulder injury he sustained yesterday while moving hay and pulling himself in and out of the cistern to fix the water pipe. Again.

He woke up this morning not able to use his left arm at all. But there are still sheep and chickens out there requiring care, so I put on his barn coat and my boots and moved the hay in the wheelbarrow, then pitchforked it over the fence to the sheep. I brought them a bucket of water. I brought the bottle lambs' bottle down to the house to be washed out and refilled, and then I hung it up again. I brought water to the chickens. I wired together the fence by the gully where the dogs were escaping.

This afternoon, I brought more hay to the sheep; helped A. set up the water pump hose in the lake with a pipe to weight it down and pulled the pull cord to start the pump*; and emptied sap from the maple trees in the gully into two full five-gallon buckets, which I then hauled up the gully bank.

I don't know how long he's going to be out of commission, but he's already frustrated at not being able to do things. And watching me do them instead. For a man like A., this kind of injury is really a problem.

Good thing he married me, right?

But we'll both be glad when he's running at full-speed again.  Whenever that is.

* He thinks there's a tiny hole somewhere in the outtake pipe in the cistern that's resulting in too much air in the pipes. So to buy himself some time until he can fix it, he wanted to fill the cistern to raise the water level above the hole. In case you cared about all of that.