Leave to a youngish mind in a middleaged, out of shape body to discover the hard way (always the hard way) that he cannot still do everything he once did. Yesterday I decided, at long last, to finish the distruction of our dog pen that Ike had started. Bearing in mind that this dog pen wasn’t your normal dog run but a fenced yard about 30′ x 50′ made of 4′ chainlink fencing.

The work went pretty well. The weather was nice for this type of work, partly cloudy and breezy. The temperature barely topped the 80° mark all afternoon. Unbolting, cutting wire ties, pulling posts out of the ground…It all went pretty well, if a little slower than what I would have accomplished in earlier days. There was a stffness in my knees that had me moving a bit slow, but all in all I made good progress.

I started on the side that was mostly gone to begin with. The side the large oak completely destroyed…

From IKE

That mainly entailed disconnecting the fence from the last post and then pulling it all up…Then dragging the fence to the road to be picked up. Next I decided to remove the opposite side. The one side undamaged. It took about an hour and a half with a little help from the John Deere to pull the fence out of the overgrown weeds and vines that had grown up through it. Ran the mower over the leavings to make it look nice and clear.

Last but not least was the long side. It took quite a beating under the onslaught of the crown of the oaks as it fell. That made the upper rails harder to remove as they were pretty bent up and didn’t want to disassemble like the ones on the other side. But slow and methodically, I worked my way down the fence. I decide to take it apart in pieces and not try to do it in one piece like the other side as I had a couple of trees I needed to work around…A couple of hours and it was all down. I began to clean up the mess….Stacking the posts and rails for salvage, picking up the tools and putting everything away. I was feeling pretty good about myself and decide to go ahead and roll up the one long piece I had left out to let the vines and weeds dry on first…I should have stuck with my original plan of letting it lay for a couple of days.

When I bent over and started to pull on the wire…pop…sharp pain in the side of my left knee…almost too much to walk on. But I managed to finish picking up, not that last piece of fence though…It’s still there, head into the house. I hit the shower and washed off all the dirt and grime before hitting the recliner and elevating the leg while waiting for my nurse to come home and kiss it to make it better.

Heat and ice and a nights rest, and while I won’t be dancing anytime soon I can walk and actually put weight on that leg…I guess I won’t be needing my son’s old pair of crutches after all, though for a time last night, they were all that allowed me to get around the house…

Now for my next trick…I still need to get some garden beds made (and it would be nice if I could learn to type a little faster while holding our newly crawling grandson on my lap with one hand).