Sisyphus

…and now we are in our stride.  We are hot, it is true, but coping with the heat. Our frail bodies forgot how to cope over the winter, but now they start to remember.  We doze a bit more.  We go easy on ourselves.  We drink plenty of water, juice and tea.  On a health kick I have been trying to substitute my usual builder's tea (with lashings of milk and some honey) for green tea with mint taken with just a dash of honey.  I started including the honey for medicinal reasons actually as it is supposed to help counteract hayfever.  Looki is still confused by the new tea.  He loves his cup of PG Tips, though I wonder if he loves the milk and honey more.  He is not too keen on the new beverage.  I keep telling him that it is good for him, so he dutifully licks around the edge of the cup, but cannot get enthused about the pool of greenish liquid at the bottom.  So we leave the dregs in the cup.  Bless his heart.  He will always try something I am eating, a slice of apple, mango or pineapple, but those things are not to his taste so he spits them out.  He prefers cheese or ham.

Lovely Looki prefers cheese and ham

The garden is coming along well enough.  It is dusty and heavy work and can only be tackled early in the morning and late in the evening.  Even if the heat allowed me to work all day I could not.  I am not as weak as a kitten, but I’m not as strong as an ox either and my body gets more and more tired as the hours wear on.  So I have to be kind to myself.

The steps begin the ascent

I have a theory that if I can at least turn a rock over then I can get it to where I want it to be...given time, but nonetheless it is hard rolling large rocks up the flight of steps that I am building.  The rocks are under the house and the final, upper-level terracing rises above by about three metres.  I was in a bit of a Catch 22 situation really, as I could not get up and down the slope without steps, but now the steps are of course impeding my ability to roll the rocks up it.  Then you hit that wall, when you just cannot roll the rock up even one more inch, so you step back and look at it and go and do some weeding, in the shade.  Or take a nap.

If I can turn it over I can move it.  One rock climbs the stairs...slowly...sometimes painfully....

The only advantage is that after a stint of rock-rolling, carrying large buckets of rubble up the steps is sort of easy-peasy, especially as buckets have handles and rocks, notoriously, do not.  There is lots of rubble that has to go up, to backfill the terraces once the large retaining rocks are in place.  Every so often, through gritted teeth as I sweat and swear and strain I say "I wish I had a man!"  I very quickly add "just to move this rock, then he can have a cup of tea or even a beer and go away again." But it really would be most useful to have someone strong around just for lifting those big rocks for me, because sometimes I simply cannot do it and the big rock has to be nudged to somewhere else entirely and not to where I actually wanted it in the first place.

Rock-rolling is not without its dangers

I feel like Sisyphus, of Greek Myth.  He was a king of Corinth and for his sins against the Gods during his lifetime he was sentenced to futile hard labour in the afterlife.  Hard labour: he had to roll a huge boulder up to the top of a hill.  Futile labour: whence it would roll down again…and he had to go down to the bottom of the hill and roll it up all over again...for all eternity.  How many times have I, or Vic and I, done jobs of hard labour in the garden only for builders and workmen to trample over our work or push it all down to the bottom of the garden again.  And now I labour on alone.  This time though, I hope, no builder will come to undo my work. 

I had a literal Sisyphus moment the other day when I dragged a great lump of rock up to the top of the hill and then, just as I was dropping it into place, it decided to bounce and went over the edge and guess what?  I had to walk down the hill and carry it all the way up again and very carefully I slid it into place.

I am still waiting to get stronger and fitter…but just need to have a little nap first.

I think that the dogs too are starting to acclimatize and getting a bit more active again.  They have discovered a large rat in the garden.  I have seen him on three occasions now, so he must be getting braver.  There is lots of cover in the garden and no open land to catch him on, but the dogs, the girls to be precise, are staking him out and I think they will get him one day.  At first it was just Candy.  She is always the one who follows me down to the garden and has a good look around.  In the last couple of weeks she has become more vigilant, staking out two or three little spots.  While I am heaving stone around she lies flat on the ground with her nose in a hole.  All I hear are serious snorting noises and then she moves and sits looking intently into another hole.  This time she just stares and occasionally tilts her head to one side or the other, listening for her prey.

Candy often comes in looking like this

or this

or even this!

This morning Kerry spent a happy couple of hours doing the intense staring and hole snorting while Candy scurried around checking all the other holes or gaps in the walls…and there are plenty.  I think she was slightly nervous that Kerry had the best pitch so she was working double time to ensure that if anybody got the rat it would be her.  Still they seem to work in tandem.  They are a formidable team and if only Looki could take more of an interest, a formidable pack.

On the other hand, he does not get half the garden stuck in his moustache...every other day.  No matter though, it is lovely to see Kerry being more puppyish at times too and in addition to the rat staking she enjoys a good roll in anything be it sand, gravel or mud (or poo).  I think it must be very cooling, perhaps I should try it (though not the poo).

It must be very cooling

It fills me with great joy that the garden is getting so full of life now and not just the Westies.  We have sparrows and blackbirds a-plenty.  There is our rat and previously a snake, which I have not seen for ages, so perhaps he has moved on.  Personally I would prefer the snake to the rat, but I am not overly worried by rats either, having lived in a vermin-leaky farm house for many years.  We also have abundant swallows, some of which nest in the roof of the old ruined building.  Bats of course.  I see them at dusk flying sideways into tiny slits in the odd-shaped shed two doors down, that belongs to Antonio and Antonia.  There are beetles and woodlice and the other day I saw a great fat green caterpillar on my rue bush.  I was looking at the plant intently as it is looking a bit brown and was thinking of giving it a prune, but when I saw the caterpillar and a buddy of his having a snack I thought better of it and left it alone.  They will be swallowtail butterflies eventually.  The list goes on; locusts, black redstarts, starlings and pigeons to name a few.  And there are many more species that I do not know the name of.  The point I am making is that the garden was once pretty barren.  There was only tough grass, tougher weeds, rubble and rubbish there (including for a period of time, a stolen cigarette vending machine).  There was very little wildlife apart from a few wandering gypsies, but slowly the garden is coming to life on many different levels…and it fills me with an intense happiness and pride.

I love sharing my garden with a vast array of wildlife 

So perhaps it is not such a ‘sisyphustic’ trial after all.  Things are changing out there, slowly it is true, but steadily the garden is evolving into something more beautiful and more interesting and whatever else happens, I will not let that fall back down to the bottom of the hill.

I think that today we will give the last word to Candy!  Gotta love her!