My watch talks to me. I bought my current watch, a Samsung something, a few years ago at the behest of Mary Beth. It isn’t as fancy as an Apple Watch, but it’s a good bit cheaper, and really, I only need it for one thing. Mary Beth said I wasn’t responding to her texts, and this watch would let me know when a text arrives. And sure enough, I get a small vibration on my wrist—and in my left, iPhone, pocket—so I am well-informed about incoming texts.

I do not take advantage of many other features of my watch, which include monitoring workouts. This is mostly because I do not take advantage of workouts. My watch does track the distance I cover on walks, though, and it records my all-important Steps. I used to allow the Samsung to monitor my sleep, but in the last few months, it started lighting up and buzzing at random times during the night, so my watch now sleeps in a separate bed.

It’s a smart watch, but not too smart. It interprets yard work as an exercise routine. For example, the watch might sense my elevated heart rate and sweat production and believe I’m swimming. When I’m push-mowing—legs moving and hands steady—my watch thinks I’m on a bicycle. Other types of yard work generate a variety of activity icons I can’t quite interpret. I might be digging weeds or hauling yard waste, and my watch displays symbols that could be canoeing or wrestling or rhythmic gymnastics. Confusion reigns in the great outdoors.

Along with the nighttime flashes, my watch has picked up another quirk. It only occurs during those mysterious workout/yard work episodes, but it’s certainly alarming, watch-wise. I’ll be shoveling mulch or scraping mucky leaves out of a gutter, and suddenly, a woman’s voice will tell me how many laps I’ve swum, or she’ll exhort me to keep pedaling.

The first time my watch talked to me, I almost fell off a ladder. She doesn’t speak up often, but it’s always startling.

The latest episode happened yesterday, when I was removing a large tree limb that had fallen in a storm a few weeks ago. The tree is one of many lining our road frontage, and the big limb had brought down others when it fell, so there was a lot of wood to cut and haul. I positioned my pickup truck close to the action, next to the eight-foot embankment leading up to our property, with my two right wheels in the ditch. That allowed me to pitch logs and branches into the truck bed as I hacked them up.

This was, I calculated, a forty-five-minute job. Right after the destructive storm, I had watched a crew of professionals dismantle much larger fallen limbs in no time at all, and my job was nothing compared to what they had tackled. The difference, of course, is that they were a team of five with a chipper, and my solo efforts were slowed by the need to stop chopping and take a truckload of branches to my branch-dumping spot.

After two hours of cutting, loading, and unloading, I was wearing down. Working on my third truckload, I was hot, tired, and depleted. Then my watch started talking.

“Pick up the pace,” she said, loudly.

Startled badly, I was certain that an actual woman was standing close by, inexplicably giving me encouragement. Seeing no one, I thought to look at my watch, and sure enough, it showed a running timer below one of those mysterious icons. There’s no telling what it thought I was doing.   

I chuckled to myself and kept going. I had cleared away the smaller branches and was left with only thick lengths of limb. It was nearly noon by then, and the cool morning had turned hot. The larger limbs were heavier, of course, and I pitched them into the truck bed with hopes of mashing down the gnarly-snarly branches so that this could be my final load.

“Go just a little faster,” my watch said.

“Eat bark,” I replied. I fantasized about taking the chainsaw to my Chatty Cathy timepiece.

Mustering the strength for another heave, I watched as a big log hit the branches in the bed and bounced off, falling behind the truck. Thinking it might be extending into the road I was already half blocking, I clambered down the embankment and picked up the stray log. I squatted and hoisted, lifting with my legs and not my back.

“Go just a little faster,” my watch repeated.

Just as I was about to unleash a stream of cuss words at the lady living in my watch, an actual lady appeared.

“Hello,” she said, walking past my truck, the log, and me.

“Hello,” I responded cleverly.

The woman was wearing running shorts, running shoes, and a tank. She must have run out of steam on the hill and slowed her run to a walk to get to the crest. I don’t know how many miles she had run, but she looked way fresher than I did, and I’d been stomping around for the last two hours in one place.

Determined to finish my task, I climbed back up the embankment and grabbed another log to load. Using a two-handed lift and push, I aimed for the middle of the truck bed, only to see the log roll off the far side. Once again, I scuttled down the embankment, hurrying to retrieve the log before a car came. I grabbed it and stepped to the back of the truck to heave it into the bed. I pushed the log up and over, and as I turned to go back up the embankment, I saw the woman, now in a downhill trot.

Too exhausted to speak, I reached up to touch the brim of my hat in a sweaty but courteous salutation. She smiled and spoke briefly as she rushed by.

I was totally spent and half delusional, but I’m pretty sure I heard what the lady said as she sped by. And her voice sounded all-too familiar.

“Pick up the pace.”