We moved last weekend. My husband’s job was primarily to get his books in boxes; he has a lot of books. He’d also packed a few other things I’d asked him to take care of.
As we unpacked, I started to chuckle. “Andrew,” I said, hiding a grin, “Why are all the other boxes you packed labelled ‘Miscellaneous’?”
He paused from taking books out of boxes to put them on shelves, and replied with confusion, “There was a lot of different stuff!”
This is marriage: when one person sorts and packs for ease-of-locating-things and the other dumps everything in a box. You either drive each other crazy or laugh. Sometimes, of course, you do both.
So I have the coat hook rack for the front closet and the screws that go with it and the power drill to install it (all of which I packed) but the extension cord is somewhere unknown. Which means that as I type this my spouse is ripping open six large boxes and rummaging through them, dumping things everywhere.
God bless him.
“Please don’t take anything out of a box unless you are putting it away,” I quickly caution, trying to prevent further chaos. Then I take a deep breath, put the drill and coat rack in a place I can find them later, and choose to do something else until the extension cord shows up.
It would be nice to be able to do what I like in the way that I like at the time that I like, but learning forbearance, patience and how to laugh instead of scream is probably more important. If everything was convenient, I wouldn’t have to learn that.
