the list

I married a man who came with scores of tools. He was impressed by my independent-woman-apartment-dweller box of tools I owned when we moved in together, and I was dazzled by the sheer array of power everythings he had. He can fix almost everything, and usually does.

That being said, he is an extremely busy man, too, and right now he's got about an eighteen month backlog of projects. (Which, come to think of it, is about the age of our daughter.) During the winter it doesn't bother me that things are slow to get finished in the house, but come Spring, things change. Handyman magazines start appearing in the bathroom, and when we go for drives we point out to each other the changes we see in the neighboring houses.

When the gardening catalogs arrive, I spend evenings camped out at the kitchen table. Humming delightedly, I sketch out my proposed flower gardens and ponder where I'll put the herbs in and whether it would be a clever idea to train ornamental pea vines over the old apple trees or not.

(Most of these plans end up being castles in the air - we live close to the river and the woods and the deer eat everything.)

Today, after some (cough) gentle reminding, B began a job we've been needing to finish for about a year. He was busy today, ripping wood and measuring and making trips to the lumberyard - so when I saw him after work he was dusty and tired. He wasn't receptive to hearing about the new! project I think we should aim toward starting this summer, the one I saw in a magazine article today, the one that has me plotting and planning and thinking about how I can help, what I can do, how I can make this work. He wants to finish this job before he plans another, so I'll whisper it to you......


Pergola.


And this is why Bear hides all the Canadian Woodworker magazines from me now.