Day by Day

The faster I go, the behinder I get. At least it seems like it. When you don’t have use of your legs, you have to spend twice as much time doing half the work.  I know, I know, it doesn’t seem like our legs do much when it comes to cleaning the house, teaching a class, weeding a raised bed garden or just doing day to day chores, but trust me, they do. 

Seems like we ride down the rows picking ripe tomatoes or green beans easily and watch the scooter basket fill with free produce. Ha. We ride down the rows all right, but we pick off the tomato worms, some big enough to hitch a ride on. In order to squish the tomato worm, a foot has to be raised up to the level of the raised bed. That ain’t easy. And I’m not about to squish one with my bare hands.  Tomatoes have to be staked so they won’t fall over and get driven over by my scooter. Staking requires standing up and tying a string at the same time. When it takes all your strength to stand up, suddenly tying a string around a recalcitrant tomato can be daunting.  

I am pulling tomato plants now as they are done producing. They want to stay in the ground and resist being pulled. After you pull a few, they have to be transported to the compost heap. Somewhere during that transport with one hand clutching several pulled plants, the other steering the scooter, you run into a spider web - with spider.  And no hand to brush it away.  What a wake up call that is!

And the swimming pool seemingly needs daily maintenance. Oy. Up the ramp, down the ramp, bend over to get the cover off. Pull that sucker out.  Now turn on the pump. Oh wait, it needs chemicals.  Back up the ramp to get them. Gotta find something sharp to open the bag with. The scissors is not where they were left. Maybe my garden hand snips will do the job. They do. Back down the ramp to fling the chemicals over the water. Now turn on the pump. Wait, read the directions on the bag. Does the pump need to be on or off. On for an hour, then off.  Back up the ramp to put things back where they belong. It’s not even 7am.

It’s going to be a long day.

In My Own Backyard

My scooter sits right outside the back door in a little cubby built just for it. The cubby has a roof to keep it dry and an electric outlet to plug it in at night. 

All I have to do is get to the back door, into the seat of the scooter, back up, then drive down the ramp and travel the paths of our 6 acres. Granted I can’t get up and down the ravine to the creek, but I am so happy with my at home travels. We are in the process of building a switchback so I can get to the creek, but that's slow going, as you can imagine. 

Can’t get up this grade, but that’s OK.

The deck you see has a ramp up to it and down the other side. The back door is where the scooter lives during the night and when it’s raining.

I can get to the veggie gardens

I garden in raised beds. These are straw bales when they were installed in February.  Now they are filled with tomatoes, peppers, okra and green beans. 

I also have a flower garden that I can see directly from the living room.  Donna loves  gardening as much as I do. She is in charge of the flower gardens.

So, you can see that we who are mobility ‘challenged’ live our lives just about like you do.  Sure we are not over four feet tall, but we travel fast and are not all that disadvantaged.