It was high noon Monday. The gig was up inventory was low. I had fantasized predicted that Emily’s late summer bottling marathon was going to last forever until her October break. But it didn’t take a psychic person who could count to five to see that since Emily departed back to her life at college, a large number of our Flower Essences had vanished into thin air done what our Flower Essences do. They had been sent off into the wider world into your hands.
So this morning, I dove back into the job that, up until I broke my arm. had been mine.
I began to bottle again. I think I can safely say that I will no longer need to do the arm rehab exercise that required me to do 10 reps X 4 times a day with a two pound arm weight.
An average day of bottling requires me to lift a two pound box of bottles up and down to the bottling gizmo twenty times to fill twenty bottles. Then this is repeated with fifty more boxes. That makes for 1000 reps with a two pound arm weight. I think that is enough.
And my rehab putty activities to help me improve finger strength and dexterity? Also now unnecessary. Will is going to be a very happy camper tonight when he inherits my putty collection. I may not be able to use my left hand with any skill, speed, or dexterity yet, but bottling is going to give me a lot of practice. And that makes me optimistic about my long term recovery of most of my arm and hand skills. I may never want to move as fast as I used to (having found genuine joy in moving slower this summer), but someday I probably will have a choice about that again.
But let’s go back to the stuff of legends where we left me at the bottling sink……….. Because I had fiddled while Rome burned done other things instead of bottling these past few weeks, pretty much everything required extra steps. There were no 2 ounce red shisos bottled. There were also no 2 ounce bottles washed. There were also no 2 ounce bottles racked in boxes ready to be washed. There were also no 2 ounce bottles out to be racked….. You get the picture.
By necessity, I was moving further and further away from what I had originally thought of as the task at hand….. and everything I was doing to get myself back to square one I was doing at the speed of a terrapin. Because that’s my new speed! And generally, I am loving my new speed. But not so much this morning. There were just toooooooo many hovering faces.
I began to think I needed a four hour coffee break in town needed to pull a Sarah Bernhardt with a dramatic scene about my arm needed to learn how to bark, needed to wave a white flag of surrender, because every time I saw one of today’s three shippers, they were standing in front of me with their heads tilted and sympathetic smiles on their faces, telling me most earnestly, “Molly we are out of Baby Blue Eyes.” “Molly we are out of Sage.” “Molly we are out of Chamomile.” Molly we out of A LOT of the new Camino Essences.” “Molly we are out of Anxiety.”
Basically we were out of everything.
While I let my fingers do the walking began to fill in the inventory gaps, the shippers read me excerpts from the mail. This always lifts me up. What lovely, lovely letters you write! It always makes me feel so grateful that I get to be here. Yes, even today, when I was more turtle than hare. Your letters took me from half glass full to cup overflowing in a nano second. And that is a pretty remarkable thing for a terrapin like me.
PS We are having problems with the archives on the blog. My apologies! While Ben tries to figure out how to fix this, please know that all the past blogs are there and can be accessed if you just keep scrolling down through the current blogs. I am particularly loathe to have you lose easy access to the Camino blogs, so we are trying hard to fix this problem. Like so many computer events, this seemed to happen out of the blue and yes, fixing this problem has been another more turtle than hare moment for us……… While we all wait for the fix, can I read you an excerpt from your dear letter to us?