Not giving up

I am sore. Leaning over the sink to do the dishes - hurts. Unscrewing the cap from a jar of applesauce - hurts. Sometime I'll look up the names of the muscles that I'm discovering, but for now I'm thinking of them as lifting muscles and leaning muscles. Last Saturday was a lifting day. We lifted crates of sweet potatoes up onto a truck bed and then down again, and carried them into a cooler and stacked them higher than my head. Then I carried cinderblocks from one side of the greenhouse to the other, swept, and carried them back again. My arms, my thighs, and my butt were sore for the next couple of days--these are what I think of as lifting muscles. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday there has been more harvesting and less lifting. Harvesting, at this time of year, usually means kneeling and leaning forward while doing something with my hands; grasping and cutting baby spinach or lettuce, kale, collards, or digging sunchokes. For the greens especially, I'm trying to reach halfway over the bed with both hands, while keeping my knees and feet in the narrow path and without putting pressure on any part of the bed. The muscles in my back that allow me to suspend my upper half over the bed--these are the leaning muscles.

Yesterday my fingers were so cold while harvesting spinach that I started thinking of them as artificial extensions of my body; blunt appendages that I could roughly control, but without any accuracy. Today, while harvesting baby lettuce and more spinach in a bitterly cold wind, my hands were colder. I was actually afraid that I might slice a finger off with the knife, and not feel it. I wasn't even sure my finger would bleed. I should look up information about frostbite, so I know how cold my fingers can get and still recover.