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 Texas : Features : Columns : Letters From North America :

What happened after the move

by Peary Perry
Peary Perry
Anyone who has been married for any length of time can identify with what I am about to say.

Aside from the physical aspects, there is a distinct difference between the way men think and the way women think. Trust me on this one.

As you know, if you have been reading this for some time, we just moved into another house. I won’t bore you with a repeat of the dangers associated with making the actual move. This week I’d like to cover a few things that have happened after the move.

The first is that women seem to think about a garbage disposal the same way as a man thinks about a chipper/shredder. The one in the house we moved into was the ever popular ‘weasel’ model and is about 1/3 horsepower. Barely enough to chew up wet paper towels. My loving wife is used to the giant industrial commercial grade one I had installed in our previous house. This was the 5 horsepower (Turbo-Destructor Model 9500) with the rope pull start cord which could be used in case of emergency. You could grind up a stump or angle iron if you needed to do so. I think you had to have some sort of national security clearance just to own one.

Anyway, we hadn’t been in the new place more than a week and my bride forgot about the disposal and dropped something like a banana peel or a potato peel down and of course, it backed up. Naturally this always happens on either late Friday evening or on the weekend, when the repair guys are on quadruple overtime with mileage and bonus incentives. Fortunately for us, our youngest son is living with us until he gets married in a couple of months and he installed the new ‘Super Beaver- 1000’ model. We couldn’t get one of the old ones since they are no longer on the market after 9/11. I hope the people who bought our old house are not any sort of national security risk. But, now we are back on track and life is good once more in our happy home.

That is except for a couple of things. First off, women think nothing of moving furniture just for the shear pleasure of it. Men tend to leave things in place. My wife will actually move a couch from one wall to another for some unknown reason to me. I have never in all of my years actually considered moving all of the bedroom furniture from one place to another …. ‘Just to see how it looks’. I know how it looks, it looks fine. Leave it alone. You don’t see men moving duck and deer blinds from one place to another. Nope, they leave them in the same places, year after year. There’s a good reason for that…ask any hunter and he’ll tell you….

Second thing concerns hanging pictures. If men hang pictures, they tend to keep it simple, bang a nail into the wall and put the picture on the nail. Not so with women. They will actually ‘arrange’ pictures. They will do all sorts of measurements and then put five or six pictures on the same wall and keep them all even and level. Men cannot do this even with one of those new laser levels. Men are used to dealing with abstract concepts and shapes such as the skins from some prehistoric beast or a deer or buffalo skin. Women can handle squares and rectangles such as we see on picture frames. Men do not have this ability since in nature there are no straight lines. Another point I’d like to make, if a man hangs a picture on a wall, it stays hung there until he moves to another house or he dies, whichever comes first. My wife will actually move pictures around from place to place (see earlier comments about furniture). She doesn’t have any credible explanation for this kind of behavior and after you have been married as long as I have then you know better than to ask why she is doing what she is doing. If your wife engages in this kind of activity and asks you if you think the pictures look nice, I suggest you agree with her.

One final thought for you young men about to married for the first time, do not under any circumstances suggest something along the lines of… “Honey I think that picture would look good on that wall”. If you do this, do so at your own risk since she will assume you like to move furniture and you enjoy doing it. You will thank me for this advice many years from now.


© Peary Perry
Comments go to pperry@austin.rr.com

Letters From North America - April 12, 2009 column
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