Country Blokes

One thing I love about country blokes is their ability to take on just about any task.  In the city, if you need some plumbing done, you call a plumber.  If you need a limb removed from a tree, you call someone in.  Many people don't even mow their own lawns anymore.  Not out here.  Country blokes are tree surgeons, plumbers, mechanics, fencing contractors and windmill greasers. They can drive a truck, fix a toilet, operate a chainsaw, build a shed, ride a horse and take on a bull in close quarters.  Let me tell you, these men are amazing.  It's easy to fall in love with a farmer/grazier.  There's really nothing that makes a woman feel so uniquely feminine as having a bloke around who is so completely masculine.

So you marry the guy, knowing that any problem that arises, he can handle.  Any work that needs doing is done.  But these men are not supermen.  They look it, they act like it, and by crikey you feel it, but sooner or later it all catches up.  You can't flog your body for years and years without there being some consequences.  You notice little things.  When he drives, he holds onto the handbrake to take the load of his back.  If we walk for any distance, he starts to limp.  And he's only in his mid-thirties.

We've just applied for some grants to fence off water sources and land type and if we get them, my husband will have to cut nearly a thousand fence posts, dig a thousand holes, lift a thousand posts into those holes, bore four thousand holes into those posts and pull  forty kilometers of wire through those holes.  He has not mentioned what this will do to his back, I don't know that he's even thought of it.  If he has, it hasn't registered that it might be a problem.  The work just needs to be done and the budget does not allow for assistance.  All this has to be done by next May.  I just hope his body holds out until my new unborn baby has a chance to grow up and take the load off a little one day.