My Darling B woke up totally knackered this morning. Or, if she wasn’t completely tired out the minute she woke up, she felt like it just moments after finishing her shower and settling onto the sofa with her morning cuppa joe. After spending close to seven hours working her garden Sunday, and maybe six or seven on Saturday, she couldn’t feel any other way, not after spending all winter inside watching movies, reading books and surfing the internet.

But when the skies cleared and the sun shone and the temperatures climbed into the sixties all weekend long she could hardly be expected to do anything but start turning over clods in her garden with a great big fork and sticking seeds in the ground, and that’s just what she did. At least she had the good sense not to grind herself down completely to a little worn-out nub. She took a kitchen timer to the garden with her, set it for sixty minutes each time she went and, when it rang, came in to sit on the sofa for ten or fifteen minutes, however long it took to suck down a couple big glasses of cold water.

It didn’t keep her from feeling the burn, though. When she got up after dinner she was hobbled by stiff muscles in her legs, back arms, you name it. “Did you know you have muscles right here?” she asked me, pointing at the bony back of my wrist. “Well, you do.”

To generate some sympathy pain for her, I rode my bike to work this morning. It’s about three or four miles away, easily doable in a half-hour even with the flabby winter muscles I have. Took me forty minutes and my butt was sore enough to force me to walk funny. Luckily I only had to walk as far as my desk, where I could sit down for a couple hours and let the feeling come back to my legs.