I was looking at my to-do list today. You know the one: posted in command central, the place where you can find plenty of loathsome tasks waiting for your attention.
Our lists are posted on a big whiteboard in our kitchen. Most of them written in my wife’s careful script.
But the list I was looking at today was written in my own hand. Yes, I’d broken the sacred rule and added to my husbandly burden. Mind you, in my defence, it was obvious that I’d made this error sometime in the exuberant throes of spring, and, to the best of my knowledge, had yet to act on any of the items. Now I was standing in front of it, coffee in hand, ready to erase it.
But when I reread the list, rather than erasing it I drew a black border around it and framed it instead. It’s not that it’s a significant list. It seems that when I wrote it I had need of lumber for a long-forgotten project. And that I was thinking sticks might make good perches for the birds in our garden. And that evidently it was berry season: we were having, as I recall, a “spittle bug” problem in one of our shrubs.
It was the sum of these things that made me smile. As I stood gazing at it, I thought, “This is a good list. This list is too good to erase.”
So I left it where it was, in the corner of our whiteboard, the frame around it. And if I ever feel that there’s nothing to do, or that I have no purpose in life, it’s there for me to consult. Life could be worse.
Here then is my permanent to-do list:
Get Wood
Find Big Sticks
Pick Strawberries
Spit Bugs
Ottawa, Ontario