FIRST thing Saturday morning, we emptied the water from the wood fired hot tub, filled it fresh and stoked it up with Mesquite and Pecan so that by 8:30 it would be one-hundred-four degrees of blessed, relaxing, healing, liquid heat.

THEN we stripped the dead summer garden of leaves, vines and the dried up tomatoes we didn't pick.
 
THEN we shoveled, one-forearm deep by one forearm-and-a-hand round, holes, two rows of them, twenty feet apart. Ten trees: three pears, two plums, four peaches and a nectarine.
 
THEN we pounded ten, six foot high steel fence posts into the ground about one-full-arm from each trunk. The ground was so hard, I could do this only by stepping up into the tractor bucket with a one-hundred pound hunk of steel pipe and hammer down with all my strength;  It took about twenty slugs each.
 
THEN we took stiff coiled, rusty, six by six, ten gauge wire mesh (like they put in concrete slabs) and made cages around each tree, tying them to the steel fence posts with bailing wire. In this drought, pears, plumbs, peaches and a nectarine would tempt any deer.
 
THEN the sun had already set and we missed taking the dogs down to the Palapa on the water and toasting each other for a day well spent. And we were spent!
 
LAST, before falling into that kind of rest one only gets when muscles you forgot you had flatline you into cushion of sleep, Lynn and I sunk into that one-hundred-four degrees of blessed, relaxing, healing, liquid heat.
 
Life isn't so much about the race anymore. It's not about buying or having so many things. It's not about position or posturing or politics.
 
Life is about building things and planting things and doing the things that matter most.