The older I get the more value I place in accomplishing simple household tasks without having to bend over.  Economy of motion becomes more important every year that passes.  Why bend if you don’t have to?

I’ve got a large picture window in the front of my house.  The witch of November that Gordon Lightfoot sung about in the song The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald had nothing on the gale force winds that howl through this window in the winter.  If I don’t cover it with plastic, you can keep meat fresh in front of that thing.  If you have an older house with windows that need replacement, you know what I’m talking about.

This plastic is a great invention really.  You can cover all your windows with the stuff and cut down on heat loss and drafts.  Everyone’s seen it.  All you have to do is run a strip of double-sided tape all around the interior window frame, stick the plastic to it, then hit it with a hair dryer to shrink it to a nice, tight, mostly-transparent barrier to the cold.  It works. I hate that I have to do it every year because it’s a bitch to put up.  But it’s easy to take down.  Mostly.

You see, the weather had gotten consistently warm enough to give me enough courage to take down my window plastic.  There’s always trepidation when I take it down because it can snow as late as mid-May in the state of Wisconsin.  Superstitiously, I feel that I might somehow cause it to snow if I take down my plastic too soon.  I can’t tell you how often I’ve prematurely removed my window plastic or taken the snow brush out of my car only to have a foot of snow drop the next day.  I’ve got all sorts of pictures of flowers covered in snow and robins bouncing around the yard looking for worms with a “What the fuck?” look on their face.  Early warm spring days aren’t to be trusted in Wisconsin.

Taking down the plastic isn’t a hard job but it takes planning to do it most efficiently.  I usually start at the top left corner of the window and continue, clockwise.  If you go slowly, everything usually peels away in one smooth motion.  But sometimes, the tape snags and infuriatingly snaps in half.  If the break is up high, it’s no problem.  You just scrape the tape free with your fingernail and resume peeling.  No problem.  But, if the break is below three feet from the floor you have a critical decision to make that can require nasty bending over to rectify.

When I was younger, tape breaks weren’t that big of a deal.  I’d just do what was necessary to keep moving forward to get the stuff off the window.  It wouldn’t matter if the break was high or low.  I wouldn’t think twice about my methodology.  I’d just bend over, scrape the damned tape free, and keep going.  I’d bulldoze straight forward on my intended line and nothing would get in my way.  Bending didn’t matter.

But now that a few years have gone by, I realized there’s an easier way.  For breaks below three feet, if you simply peel the tape from the other direction, you can still get the job done and not have to bend over!  Genius.  You can tackle the problem using brain power and not sheer brawn.  What really gets me thinking is why is it such a big deal to bend over?  What is it about bending that becomes so abhorrent after age 35?

My mom perfected the art of not bending any more than necessary.  I remember when I was a kid she could pick up a sock from the floor only using her toes.  It was an amazing feat to watch.  She’d walk up to it, extend her bare foot, nimbly grapple the sock with her toes, and then lift it up to her hand without any loss of balance whatsoever.  It was a gymnastic demonstration of grace and beauty.  She could have done this from a balance beam and not lose poise.  My mom could have run a Smith-Corona typewriter with her toes.  She could deal cards with her feet.

This whole process reminds me of a joke my uncle told me when I was twelve.  I was all excited to go do chores with him on his farm and started to get impatient when he wasn’t moving as fast as I’d liked.  He noticed my agitation and got a glint in his eyes.  As we sat down on the bench seat of his pickup he put his arm around me and extolled, “Once, there was an old bull and a young bull standing up on top of a high hill overlooking a herd of peacefully grazing cows.  The young bull enthusiastically told the old bull ‘Hey, let’s run down there and fuck us one of those cows!’  To which the old bull calmly replied, ‘Whattya say we walk down there and fuck them all.’”  At the time I wasn’t sure what he was talking about.  Now I understand.  There’s plenty of time for everything and quite possibly an easier way to accomplish your goals.

Things change.  You might still have the energy to go about familiar jobs when you get older, you just find a way to do them in a way to get the most completed with the least effort.  You don’t get older you get better.