communing with a pickaxe

One of our living cheerfully assignments this week is to think about what makes us beautiful, inside and out, and to write about it and take a picture of ourselves.

I'm not entirely sure what I was thinking about when I took this picture! My wellies, mostly, which have somehow hardly made it into the picture at all. Mind you, this was the 71st picture, I believe, and by that point I was so carried away with the excitement of taking a picture of myself in the giant mirror and was concentrating so hard on not having a stupid expression (oops, didn't manage that one) that I'd forgotten that the whole point was my wellies in the first place.

Still, you get the impression. Today I'm beautiful because I'm strong enough to pull on my steel toe capped wellies and get out in the garden and wield a pickaxe.

I've spent the whole day communing with this pickaxe, which belongs to a friend, and this rather fabulous green enamel bucket, which belongs to ME, after Peter rescued it from a skip.

I took plenty of photos of piles of rubble and soil and stones that are now covering most of the garden path (the bits of path that I didn't attack with the pickaxe, that is). But they mostly just look like any old building site you'd care to imagine.

So instead, here's a couple of photos of the old stones that are lining the path I've just demolished. The idea was to free them up and use them to pave my new sitting-out-for-breakfast-area.

Rather beautiful, don't you think?

I've dug down 18 inches, and still haven't reached the bottom. This is going to be a longer job than I imagined...

Still, I'm hot and sticky, I've spent the day in the sunshine listening to the birds, feeling first strong, and then tired, and now achey. I've worked to change my world today (the garden part of it at least), and it feels good.

Cheerful living indeed.