My Wife Gives Me Tasks Everyday

No longer gainfully employed, I nonetheless try to accomplish something every day.

It’s usually a task assigned to me by my wife, added to a list she continuously updates. Typically it’s a chore on the home front, such as laundry, dishes or making the beds in the guest room. Occasionally it involves fixing something, a never-ending task that comes with living in a 108-year-old house.

I like checking things off the list. More precisely I like checking one thing at a time off the list.

For years I worked in a newspaper office with a daily deadline that I had to meet. It was, after all, the point of a daily newspaper, to print the news each day. There was no skipping a day because nothing was happening. Other things could be put off. Getting the newspaper to print wasn’t one of them.

My deadlines now offer much more flexibility. Things on the list Barb has forgotten about tend to go undone, replaced by tasks more to my liking – like hunting. It’s on the list nearly every day.

I’ve convinced my wife I need to hunt, the dogs need to hunt and consequently hunting has become a valid entry on the list. It gives me something to check off nearly every day.

It took me a while. Barb used to be convinced hunting prevented me from making any headway on the list. She claimed during hunting season I accomplished little or nothing around the house, always promising I’d get to it once the season was over, which I seldom did.

But following a bout of oldmanitis that immobilized me last fall, walking became a priority. I walk every day including four months in the fall when I walk with dogs and a gun.

Every day I hunt I cross that off the list, usually pointing out my accomplishment to Barb, who still asks: “That’s on the list?”

“Broken oven,” and “Hole in the living room ceiling,” have yet to be marked off, but I draw a line through “Hunting,” nearly every day.

It makes me feel good to still be accomplishing something. If it’s walking three miles with the dogs and firing my gun in the air, so be it. It fills the void that a real job left.

“Besides,” I tell my wife, “the dogs need the exercise.”

“Sure, honey,” she replies, “And when is the season over again?”

Parker Heinlein is at [email protected]