Exercise

After five consecutive days of working in the Garden every morning at daylight, I decided on my plan for today - do as little as possible. 

A hundred years ago, when I was young and slender and my joints were flexible and my muscles the same, I was in a Yoga class.  I remember that I was able to do most of the exercises, but my problem with the discipline was that I should be expected to remember the names of the positions.  The only one I remember this day is Greeting the Sunrise.  That may not even be the exact name, but that’s how I remember it.  That’s what I’m practicing this morning.  I’m sitting in a wire chair IN the garden, laptop on my lap, ready to Greet the Sunrise. 

If you remember my photo from last week, I had a wire chair piled with cuttings from the Spanish lavender.  I ended up leaving them overnight and they had settled a bit by the next day.  Then, two days ago, I sat in the chair in my garden work clothes, and they gave off the loveliest fragrance.  A few minutes sitting surrounded by that smell and I was ready to work again.  I’ve left them there since and have sat again a few times, like right now.  Because the cuttings were so many, and the stems so woody, and the needles filled with oil, it makes a good cushion and I expect to leave it here until it all crumbles.  Much better than stripping the branches and putting the leaves in a jar to be saved for later use.

I had to walk through two spider webs to get to the chair and from here can see my large garden spider still at the shed.  He or she has been busy this week, maintaining the web and entertaining me.  

Over the last four days I’ve watched the wildlife in this Garden.

A bumble bee - yes, the black and yellow kind - flitted from purple flower to purple flower of the Ruellia looking for nectar.  They must have been mostly empty, but he disappeared complete inside of one of them, and later came back to go through the same routine.  Did he forget that he had already been to that plant, or was he hopeful that something wonderful had happened in the 10 minutes since he had been gone? 

There has been a Monarch in the garden - the signal of their migration this year.  Usually we don’t see them until later - in September - but with everything so wet and still so green and growing, I guess they are getting an early start back to wherever it is they go.

We’ve had a lot of small grasshoppers in the grass at home.  I walked through the front yard there, Thursday evening to put out the garbage can, and kicked up quite a few.  Unusual for us to have so many in town.  Then Friday or Saturday morning here at Mom’s I found a rather large grasshopper in the lantana.  I thought he would jump away as I started weeding and raising the limbs to gather them up for propping, but he seemed comfortable enough where he was, and with what I was doing, that I was able to inspect him from just a few inches away. 

I’ve seen another of those black and red spiders, in another bed this time, so I guess I’d better be a little careful, just in case they are black widow spiders.  This one I smashed quickly, just in case - and before I thought about it - then wished I’d been a little slower on the reflexes so I could examine it’s back more closely (figuratively, of course), and decide if it truly was a spider I didn’t want to make friends with.

The bed I worked Sunday and Monday, digging out the day lillies, had only three earthworms in it.  Considering that the other beds I’ve worked in the middle of the yard had plenty of those excellent gardeners, it makes me wonder why this patch was so bereft of them.  Could it be that the lillies were so tightly packed that the worms had no room to work?  And no supplies to work with?  There were no weeds and no grass, nor anything else in that bed except for a volunteer pecan tree and a few volunteer mulberries that were just beginning to make headway.  Maybe now that it is as emptied of those bulbs and runners as I can get it, they will multiply.  I sure hope so. 

I can hear a bird, a yard or two down, and think it’s the cardinal.  We have a pair of those who like the black oil sunflower seeds that Mom puts out.  We also watched a pair of jays yesterday afternoon, back and forth to the feeders. 

Another sound, besides the traffic, which is rather muffled today, are the cicadas.  Sunday evening, when I was watering, there must have been hundreds of them in the trees.  It’s not an unpleasant sound, though it can be monotonous.  Still, they don’t go at it for long before they take a break.  I wonder if they are calling to each other or if they make noise for their own enjoyment?  Shows you that I know next to nothing about them.  I discovered a blog from an entomologist in Missouri that’s really good reading.  Over the next few weeks, as I read through his writings, maybe I’ll find out about these critters.  

So what does all of this chatter have to do with my title?  Plenty.  What’s the point of exercise if  you receive no benefit from it?  Today, in this chair, I’m receiving the benefit.

Many years after yoga failed to satisfy my need for exercise, I discovered Angela Lansbury.  Mom had a video tape that I wore out, literally, following her exercise routine.  I liked her presentation; the exercises were what I could handle, having had two back injuries by that time; I didn’t have to remember names of positions.  The exercises flowed from one to the other.  Her voice was pleasant, and her philosophy agreeable enough.  The background music easy on the ear but banal as time went on.  But after I wore out the tape, I wore out my commitment to daily exercise. 

Then, years after that, I took a class in Tai Chi.  Mom had been taking classes for years and years.  She liked it and can still do many of the exercises, now, at 87.  The class teacher was good and the exotic and hypnotic music conducive to relaxing the mind and the body.  But the teacher had health problems and the class was short-lived.  I found a CD at the library, put out by a local teacher, and tried to follow that, but had difficulty remembering the positions and Names!! again.

This year, at the library I borrowed a CD that I really like.  It’s called Movement, by Ann Smith, who looks as though she’s a dancer.  She’s about my age (gray hair and some wrinkles), but her body looks more like mine used to when I was in my early twenties.  She has a pleasant and restrained voice and an interesting manner.  She uses Mozart as the background for her exercises.  After no music, Muzak music, and exotic music, it’s a welcome change.    

 

I think I have finally hit upon the right combination for me - Movement and daylight gardening.  Whew!  It’s about time I figured something out.

Now I’ll sit and drink my tea and listen to the dog across the back and a few houses down, yapping and yapping and yapping to be let back inside.  I guess he doesn't know how good it is to be outside.