Pain!

I am in agony today. My body hurts. Specifically my back, my shoulders, my arms and my legs. That doesn’t really leave much else does it?

What happened was as follows: I am having a housewarming party this weekend (assuming that we are not being hit by a hurricane!). While the inside of my house is well up for display, the back garden was looking rather pathetic. Depending on the weather, it was either a dust bowl or a mud bath.

So after investigating, I discovered that if you go to Bog Walk (about 1 hours drive from Kingston), you can buy rolls of grass. Great I thought, just buy the grass, roll it out and I have a garden. No planting of seeds, nice and simple. So I called up, ordered, borrowed my dad’s station wagon, roped him in to help in the afternoon and off I went.

Well, of course it’s not that simple. The grass merges together in the back of the vehicle on the drive back to town, becoming one big pile of mud and grass. Which is very heavy to move. You can’t just put this on the ground either, you have to break up the soil with a heavy pitch fork thingy. My dad helped – he carried the heavy stuff! However, I still did all of the earth breaking myself. And damn it was hot.

It’s on days like this that I realise the despite the fact that I grew up in Jamaica, that this is my home and where I want to have children one day, I will never truely by a middle-class Jamaican girl. As my friends all said to me today on hearing of my plight: ‘Why didn’t you just get a man in to do it?’