A Note Worthy of Attention

Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

My husband doesn’t have many delayed-gratification strategies, so for our more than 50-year marriage, when he thinks of something he needs to tell someone, he writes it down. This seemed like a reasonable problem-solving tactic—until it became obvious he wasn’t bothering with Post-It notes. He’d just scribble his messages on the actual surface of whatever prompted his concern.

For example, if we needed more toothpaste, he’d use a washable marker to leave me a message on the bathroom mirror. That worked out great if he wanted to add shampoo or razors to the grocery list; not so great, when he left so many notes to himself about errands he needed to run that the mirror was covered with scribbled, sometimes indecipherable words which forced me to try and peer between the vowels of his memorandums every time I put on my mascara.

He still puts notes on everything. Our containers for wet wipes in each bathroom have permanent marker notes which say, “please don’t throw this away. We can refill it.” And we have—a couple of those containers date back to the days when we had little people (The youngest, Son # 6 is now in his thirties!). They should have become part of the land fill many moons past. When I recently pointed that out to him, he was irritated. “It’s a perfectly good container.” Yep. It was. Twenty years ago.

One morning in the old days when we had a video tape player, Son #5—who was somewhere between two and three years old—decided he was tired of hot cereal for breakfast, so he spooned half a bowl of oatmeal into the most convenient hiding place he could reach–the slot of the machine where the video tape was supposed to be inserted. This did not go over well with his father whose behavior made it clear that he loved his machines more than his children. First, he took the whole contraption apart and cleaned every nook and cranny. Then he grabbed a small container of white-out from the desk drawer and wrote in large, angry letters on the actual black surface of the front of the VCR, “Do Not Dump Food into this Machine.” I’m pretty sure my three-year-old considered that every time he saw it–especially after he started school and learned to read two years later!

All our electric sockets in the kitchen and bathrooms have small, clear printing in black permanent marker identifying where the reset button for that particular plug can be found. Useful information. Just wildly out of sync with the surrounding décor. Our washing machine has a series of interchangeable notes about which settings and products to use for whatever assortment of dirty clothes he’s currently cleaning. He even has a 3’x5’ card that he posts on the dryer every time he washes his dress shirts. “Please dry white shirt separately so it won’t wrinkle.” The note is at least five or six years older than any of the shirts he currently wears to church.

And his compulsive note-writing isn’t limited to inside the house. Twenty years ago when he put in the sprinkler system in the yard, he wanted to mark a several places where he might later add faucets for additional hoses, so he hammered thirty-six-inch rebar stakes into the ground to mark the spots. I’ve been mowing weekly around at least three of them for the last twenty years.

The question then becomes, is all this knit-picky messaging useful to any family member besides himself? Well, I hate to admit it, but–yes. When the garage disposal began spewing ground up yuck back at me one afternoon, my husband brought his plumber’s snake into the kitchen and shoved it down the pipe to unclog whatever was impeding drainage. I don’t actually know how far that snake reaches as I have consistently avoided interacting with disgusting metal tools that are designed to unclog toilets, etc. With my husband pushing the snake and me rotating the handle, we managed to force it 2/3 of the way down the plumbing before it refused to budge another inch. Nodding his head sagely, my husband pulled the snake out and headed downstairs to the unfinished 1/3 of our basement we use for storage.

On the ceiling of that room was a note in black magic marker—kind of like the “X” marks the spot on a treasure map. Without a second thought, my husband grabbed a hammer and a small saw and cut an opening through the wall board to reveal a joint in the plumbing pipe from the sink upstairs (which he had conveniently installed some years before exactly in the case of such an event). He unscrewed the joint and with considerable glee dug an abandoned bird’s nest out of the pipe.  Truth. (Neither of us have any idea how it got jammed in there, but birds are determined, determined little critters who clearly are considerably smarter than we give them credit for.) Voila! The garbage disposal drained as intended.

Did my husband patch the hole he made? No. “Just in case it happens again,’ he said. I’m guessing that likelihood is about one in ten million. But who knows? And fortunately, though it’s a bit unconventional, like every other situation in the house where my husband has had a reason to problem-solve, there’s a note to tell us exactly where to look for a solution.