I am coming to understand there are things in life I just can’t have. Yardsticks, for example. I can’t have yardsticks. Sure, I can buy them – I can buy them by the handful at a buck apiece, but I can’t keep them. And the tragedy is that I love yardsticks; I use them all the time. No, I guess what I mean is that I would use them if I knew where they were. Whenever I go to grab the one I keep between the washer and the dryer so I can measure out my garden rows, draw a straight line, kill a spider in the corner or knock something down off the top shelf, it’s never where I left it. What’s more, it’s never seen again. Where each and every one of them goes is a mystery my finite mind cannot solve. I mean, it’s not like you can stick a yardstick in your pocket and accidentally walk off with it. If you leave it laying around the house, it should be 3 feet of obviousness; it’s not just going to fall into the cracks, roll under the bed or accidentally get flushed.
I blame the farm. It’s the only place big enough to swallow whole every single-last-blasted yardstick I have ever bought in the past 24 years. I’m sure my kids and husband have always had some good reason to cart them into the back 40 – to use them for swords, wands, fort props, dipsticks and things I’m sure I can’t even imagine. Maybe they eat them, burn them as firewood, break them into toothpicks. I’d pay to know, I really would.
Of course, yardsticks are just the beginning of things just out of my reach. Other elusive possessions I can’t have? My own pair of gloves. Tweezers that work. Clean shoes to wear into the grocery store. A full tank of gas. A freezer full of beef.
Ok, the last is an exaggeration. I have beef in the freezer, just not a whole beef – or the best beef. Not the beef I thought I was getting, that’s for sure. We sell several steers each year and keep one back for ourselves. Unfortunately, in order to figure out who gets what, we use an arcane method of recordkeeping and inventory distribution known in industry parlance as Dave’s brain. His brain is the ledger every request for half a beef, or a quarter of a beef or a whole beef is written down on, and he is continually shuffling and reshuffling data to figure out how he can get everything sold when it needs to be sold and all his customers exactly everything they want. Unfortunately, the hardware glitches ever-so-every-single-year, and Dave’s brain will drop a ledger line or two.
That’s when my freezer situation starts to go downhill. The customer comes first, and I am not the customer. Not even close. I am the wife, the wife who knows exactly how much beef is in the basement freezer, the wife who knows how much beef is still on the hoof, but the wife who has no idea how much beef is being held back for me in Dave’s brain.
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