Soon I heard a snowmobile start up, and when I peeked out the window, I saw him tinkering with the Bearcat and the dog sled.
The dog sled? Yes, we own a dog sled. We came into it in a roundabout way: DD1 was fishing with her uncle (DH's brother) one summer when she was younger, and she spotted the dog sled submerged in the lake that the uncle lives on. Several months later, DH's brother surprised us with it--he'd hauled it out of the lake and brought it down to this little place here, thinking we could rig it up to haul behind the snowmobile so the kids could all ride. At that time DS1 was still in high school, and the rest of them were small enough to fit two on our single sled, so with the dog sled all four could go round the field at the same time.
Well, the snowmobile we had at the time didn't work well for that, something about the tongue of the sled and the track of the snowmobile. . . So the dog sled sat beside the barn for
Until pretty much now, when DH decided to try hauling firewood in from the woods with the dog sled and the Bearcat. You see, the wood pile has shrunk at an alarming rate the past six weeks. What is left of it will last another month by our estimate, and we don't want to have to turn the propane heat on this season. Knowing there are multiple stacks of firewood out in the woods ready for the burning, DH wanted to retrieve some of them while the snow is still good for sledding. It is too deep for using the tractor currently, and our ten-day weather forecast is calling for a big, mushy, muddy warm up to head our way. Not very conducive to getting that firewood up to the boiler unless we do it now with the snowmobile.
Anyway, DH hooked the dog sled to the Bearcat and proceeded to haul four or five loads of firewood from the stacks we have scattered throughout our woods and that of the neighboring farmer to the north (who doesn't heat with wood, and has told us numerous times to help ourselves to the blow-downs and deadfall on his property.) Turns out the Bearcat and the dog sled are a great team.
Well, it was such a nice sunny, temperate day that once I was done with my housework, I suited up and jumped on one of our other snowmobiles just to have some fun tooling around the fields for a while. Actually, tooling around sounds much more sedate than what I was doing. When you have 1200 foot straightaways and no traffic, well, you can open that baby up.
So anyway, I proceeded to have some fun that is probably inappropriate for a woman my age, and after nearly separating myself from the snowmobile at high speed a few times (mogul-like snow drifts), and nearly rolling it on turns a few others (whoops, a bit too sharp too fast), I decided to go back into the house and cool off. Yes, cool off. All that snowmobile hi jinks had me a bit sweaty. Those machines aren't light and do require a little muscling sometimes.
Later in the day, after DH had hauled an extra few weeks worth of wood for the boiler, and had his own fun on the zippy red snowmobile, we decided to load the dog sled up with the chainsaw and our other tree pruning accoutrements, and head back to the woods to work on some of those wild apple trees.
We spent a good hour and a half--until the sun went down--working back there, including a bit of "don't try this at home" with DH and the chainsaw about eight feet in the air doing some topping out of a tree or two.
I swear, sometimes he forgets he's heading to his mid-forties and thinks he's still 20 years old. Which is kind of ironic, because other days he is achy and feeling his age, complete with a touch of arthritis developing in the foot, ankles, and leg he broke when he was 20. Proof, I guess, that men grow old, but never really grow up.
Me? As for my behavior on occasion, I plead the fifth. :0)
Anyway, Saturday was a nice day. Productive, yet also really fun at times. And neither DH nor I killed ourselves while acting half our age.
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