The Spring That Came With a Laminated Checklist
I laminated my spring checklist to finally plan ahead, and the wind, a barn cat and a hay bale each had other ideas about it.
My wife says I plan the way other men gamble, which is to say with confidence and no evidence. So one winter I resolved to plan ahead. I sat at the kitchen table with a legal pad and wrote out every task from the first thaw through the last cutting of silage corn. Spray the lot. Check the fence. Service the mixer. I drove to town and paid a woman at the print shop four dollars to laminate it, and I will admit I felt like a man in a magazine.
The sheet was beautiful. It hung by the milk room door like a diploma. I checked off each item with a grease pencil, and for nearly two weeks nothing went wrong, which should have worried me. Then the wind took the checklist off its nail and carried it across the lot like a kite. I chased it past the heifer pen and into a hay bale, where it stuck flat against the twine with the tidy item REPAIR FENCE facing the sky.
I fetched it back and hung it up again with a stronger nail. That is when the barn cat Mildred discovered that a laminated page is the finest place in the world to sit. She took the spot on the floor beneath the nail every morning at six, and anything I wanted to read I had to read from above, like a pilot. I will say the pencil marks stayed bright, and I looked at the crop calendar each week to line the corn plan up with it, which is the kind of grown-up thing I never used to do.
By June everything on the sheet had a check beside it except one line I had written as a joke, TAKE A DAY OFF. Mildred is sitting on it as I write this, and I have decided not to disturb her. The checklist now hangs in a frame in the hall as proof that one spring in my life went to plan, with a pawprint on it, and a note from my wife that reads, in pencil, WELL DONE. If your spring needs a laugh, farm humor makes a decent second checklist.