Beech Tree News Network

What Is This Doing Here?

By Cheryl Hughes

When I walked into the living room on Saturday morning, I discovered a garden hoe on my couch.  I looked around until I spotted the file.  It was there on the coffee table—a rat tail file with a corncob handle.  Those kinds of discoveries don’t even shock me anymore.  I almost expect things from the outdoors to be resting on my furniture.  (Last winter, there was a chainsaw on my fireplace hearth.)

                My husband, Garey, is one of those people who doesn’t compartmentalize much.  Life for him is an ebb and flow of objects and events in and out of our house, our garden, his shop, our business and his pickup.  Each space is just an extra room in the grand house of life, and life is an integrated space, where he allows both people and objects equal access to most every room.  (I once discovered he had used my large granite pickle pan to catch oil from his tractor.  It is currently under lock and key.)

                In our early marriage, I would often ask, “What is this doing here?” when I found a container of worms in the refrigerator or a machete in the back floorboard of his pickup.  I have long since stopped. I have instead become a person who looks for clues, hence my looking around for a file after I discovered the hoe on my couch Saturday morning.  On the up-side, being married to Garey has really sharpened my deductive skills, which come in handy when I watch British mystery shows. 

                As a little girl, our youngest daughter, Nikki, was a lot like Garey.  I never knew what I was going to find in her room.  I found tadpoles in her aquarium and clay from the pond bank in her dresser drawer.  There were rocks under her bed, a frog in a coffee can, and a lizard in a shoe box.  Today, she has two dogs and a rabbit in her house, as well as another foster bunny in a special hutch her husband, Thomas, built. 

                I think people like Garey and Nikki are very open people.  They’re not afraid of things getting out of hand or out of their control.  Thanks to them, I have become a lot more accepting of imperfections in myself and others, and a lot more tolerant of disorder and things “out of place.”

  My house reflects this attitude.  The décor is very eclectic.  In my living room, there is a turkey fan over my fireplace, a deer head over the gun cabinet, and three Navajo prints on the adjacent wall.  My granddaughter’s tent, as well as her Barbie house, are behind the couch.  On the opposite wall is a mirror, etched with a quote I like.  There is also a roll top desk with a picture of Garey and his best friend, Rick, in a Harley Davidson frame, and there are pictures of my children and my granddaughter on the piano.  It’s important to me that everybody be represented.  Now that I think about it, the hoe on the couch fit right in.

I’ve considered going down to Garey’s shop and placing items that would seem out of place on his big red tool box or in his shop refrigerator, just to see how he’d react.  You know, something like a vase of sunflowers on top of the screwdrivers or a stack of washcloths on his beer.  But, knowing Garey, he’d “surprise” me with the flowers, never considering that I was the one who put them there in the first place then he’d keep the washcloths for grease rags.

 No, I think I’ll just let Garey be the one who puts things in unusual places.  Why mess with something that works.