I recently celebrated my 53rd birthday and am finally ready to accept that there is no free lunch. I believe you get what you earn in life. You reap what you sow. Or, in the words of Paul McCartney, “And, in the end, the love you take/ Is equal to the love you make.”
When I was quite young, my mother began instilling this ethic with the words, “Pay the Price.” And to her credit, I don’t mind hard work – I’m willing to pay the price for what I hope to achieve. It makes me feel good to look at what I’ve accomplished and know I earned it.
Here are two examples; on the left, the price paid for eliminating two big bags of poison ivy from our yard. And on the right, my reward for hours of raking grass clippings, incurring multiple chigger bites – a couple of months of cover material for the compost pile.

