I’ve been married 22 years and I’ve asked myself this question probably 100 times. Our first few years of marriage, I worked six days a week in a factory and he worked 5 days a week in a grocery store. He is a meat cutter by trade.
So, one summer, I was working the next day and he had it off. He was going to mow grass and burn a brush pile we had. He had been mowing too close to the edge of our pond, so I told him he shouldn’t get so close. I had told him many, many times before, but reminded him again. We were also in a drought long enough that the grass was crunchy. I told him to hook up the hoses to the spigot outside and run it down close to the fire, in case it got out of hand.
I came home from work that day only to find him sitting in the easy chair with his feet up, watching television. I was a little irked, thinking he had spent his day doing nothing. Then he told me why he ended up there.
He was mowing around the pond, when the mower, with him on it, fell in. He had one knee in the muck, trying to push the mower up and out. Then after he got the truck and pulled out the mower, he put it away. Said it needed to dry out.
His next bright idea was to light the brush pile. As the grass started burning toward the woods in several different places, he had to run uphill, get the hoses, attach them to the spigot and started down with the hose. It was too short, so he had to run uphill and find buckets to fill. Then run back and forth filling buckets and throwing it at all the flames threatening the woods. So, okay, he’s off the hook for today.
The next thing I can think of, is he was going to spray some kind of dust into a yellow jacket nest that made its home on our back porch in the ceiling. I am a beekeeper, so I told him he should wear my bee helmet, long sleeves, and gloves to do that job. Next, I see him through the back door with a ball cap and short sleeves on, with some kind of sprayer, on a ladder, reaching up to the hole in the ceiling. I watch him spray one puff and then the dance was on…Yellow jackets don’t like it when you invade their territory and were flying around his head. I have never seen his hands move so fast. I was wishing I was video taping it.
You don’t have to feel bad for him, he only got one sting on his ear. The next time I looked on the porch, he had a bee helmet, long sleeves and gloves on. Hmmm…..
And why is it that when he comes home with some fantastic tidbit of information, it is usually something I have been telling him for years…