rough hands

i am accustomed to intellectual labor and not to manual labor.
but you should see my hands now.
mariano kindly did not isolate me from his life and included me into his labors.
one of the first things i was invited to do was to harvest barley.
first we took his three cows (two bulls) down to pasture close to where we would work. each cow has rope tied around its head using its horns to keep the rope in place.
in the barley field you could see that the crop had not been planted by a tractor (it would be impossible for tractors to keep their balance on these steep hills) but by hand. and that is how we would harvest the barley - by hand. mariano gave me a small hand sythe where the blade looked like a curved hacksaw blade. about six inches from the ground i would grab about a dozen stocks (stems) and cut. however, what i quickly learned is that you must grab with your thumb pointing up not down. i was getting in a rhythm of cutting and stacking when the blade caught my unsuspecting thumb. ah, so the thumb goes up.
more amazing than the sharp blade was how mariano carried the enormous sheaf of barley on his back up the steep hill to his house.