Son Worshrag and his wife Busy Bee came home for a week’s visit over the July 4th holiday, so of course I put them to work, because there is much to be done. Besides, they offered.

They worked with me to hoe the tomatoes and corn in my garden. They picked blueberries, the first picking of the summer. Worsh and I hauled a king-sized bed, and split and hauled two big trailer loads of firewood from the massive white oak that fell across our driveway and utility lines back in May. I’m close to getting that project cleaned up and off my to-do list, with of course much help from our elder son Seed and our five grandsons.

I must have a little bit of my maternal grandfather, Millard Fillmore Adkins, in me. When his sons came in for a midday break from working in the fields, he told them, “Boys, mow the lawn while you’re resting.” That was back in The Depression, when my grandparents ran the county poor farm down in Lincoln County, W.Va. There was much to be done then and there is much to be done now. When I tell the grandsons about the poor farm, I explain it was where you went to live when you had no place else to go. Every county had a poor farm, including Hancock County. Sone of these days I’ll sit down with Skip Mayhew and write about that one.

“You’re a workaholic,” my wife says to me, asking me not to work until dark, to come in and relax a bit. Yet she, too, is driven to get things done. She makes a to-do list every morning of her life, and has most of the items crossed off by end of day. I’m less organized but I get a lot done, not necessarily what I set out to do. Most of my daily tasks involve manual labor. I work three or four hours in the morning, sometimes with a mid-morning break, sometimes pushing past, eat a noon meal with Honey and then we nap. I nap for one or two hours, do inside work in the heat of the day, then put in another three hours in the evening. On days like these, I go through two or three T-shirts and as many showers.

I was not always like this. I was so lazy as a boy that our elderly neighbor lady Momma Jane Kessel told my mother, “Lucille, you’re going to have to keep that boy the rest of your life.”

I did do work. I had chores, but I hated doing them. The simplest task exhausted me.

When I went away to college I found myself feeling ill at ease. My time was occupied by drinking, staying up late, and sitting around with my friends listening to record albums: Crosby, Stills and Nash, Neil Young, Deep Purple, Simon and Garfunkel, Cream, and so on. When I did go to class I often fell asleep.

Finally I understood that I missed doing work, doing something physical, working up a sweat to accomplish something. The “something” can be physical play or exercise. I’ve been playing racquetball since 1985, more or less regularly with a group of, ahem, now well-seasoned gentlemen, among them Jaybird Cookie and Ron Dusendorf. My oft-repeated mantra to my buddies is, “We stop playing racquetball, we die.” Orthopedic necessity has forced some of our group to downsize to pickleball, but I don’t care for it. I remind them that pickleball killed Mathew Perry. It was right there in the coroner’s report. I think.

Seed in his 40s has become quite the triathlete, leading his wife Miss T and sons in serious recreational biking, organizing adult volleyball and ultimate Frisbee events. We count on each other for service and family projects. I can’t count the number of refrigerators, washers and other appliances he and I and his sons have moved. Worshrag, 36, is of course a professional, earning his living as a strength trainer for college athletes and now for Army Rangers at Ft. Benning. He and Busy Bee run marathons and post motivational workouts on Instagram. Worsh recently completed a 100-mile run/walk. His toenails fell out. No big deal to him, but we all begged him not to do another.

Honey has recovered well from breaking her femur last October. Her trauma surgeon called her a rock star. Well, no wonder. She works hard around the house, and lifts heavy boxes of books at the volunteer used bookstore she manages. Yesterday she was back at her weed-whacking hobby for the first time since the injury.

“My arm muscles got tired,” she said when she put down her string trimmer after 20 minutes. “I’ll have to build them back up.”

Our bodies were made to move, to do hard work, to get something done, and there is always much to be done. Not everyone is able, I understand, but I’m grateful that I am, and I believe I am because I work.

Friends sometimes stop to say hello when I’m working in the garden. When I tell them, “I’ve got an extra hoe here,” I’m only partly kidding. Grandpa Millard would have approved.