Reflecting

Looking back.....The pain, when did it start?  Phil had been in between opportunities so it was a good time to make some home improvements.  Phil loved working outside and several winters ago our patio covering had given way to the weight of the snow and smashed smack dab in the center of the beautiful granite slab that Phil had single hand idly laid the summer before.  I was tired of feeling naked in our back yard and lovingly suggested that he build one of his famous patio coverings.  He was strong and like Popeye in my mind so why couldn't he do it by himself?  He never complained.  But the pain was starting then.  Up and down on the ladder he went. 

Later into the summer, each time Phil would try to do yard work he would begin to give out just after a couple of hours.  This was not like Phil at all.  He used to spend two days in the heat of the Texas summer and loved every sweaty drip of it.  I just kept the water coming and made sure he ate.  He was terrible about heading out into the scorching heat without food in his belly and then working until he was almost to the point of pure exhaustion and depleted of every morsel of nutrition.  He was a beast in the yard and I would quietly follow him inside the house and watch him through the slats of the blinds to make sure that he was still upright and not laid out from a heat stroke because I felt like I was always in charge of monitoring his limits because he didn't seem to know them because he was such a manly man, if you know what I mean. 

~The palm tree project~

Later that summer, I would go out after a couple of hours and find him sitting on the back porch and he was so perplexed.  He would say, "I just can't do it".  I asked him if he felt like he had a heat stroke or something because this was just not like my Hercules.  I would bring him towels soaked in cold water to put on his neck.  Heck, he planted an 8ft. palm tree a few months earlier all by himself.  What was going on?  The yard was finally at a point to where he felt complete so he rested.