The Minnesota Farm Woman

Our little house has five doors leading to the outside. That’s five doors for my OCD self to check every night to make sure they are locked. When HE is out of town, I check and double-check each door. We just replaced three of those doors, and by WE I mean HIM, with a little help from his friends. Living in a construction zone is hard, and I won’t even bore you with more complaints about not having a washing machine. There is the noise. There is the dust. There is Barney the Chihuahua who barks at everything, tries constantly to slip out the door(s) to see what’s going on and in my opinion, sure to meet certain death from an eagle snatching him up or crushed by falling sheet rock. He also still has to be taken outside to do his business, on a leash, of course, and through a maze of construction materials and demolition trash. In the winter, our county road is fairly quiet, but in the summer, the traffic increases due to fishing, resorts, and campers. This morning was no exception, even at six a.m., as Barney and I stepped outside for a brief morning stroll. We usually do this unobtrusively, out the back door, but right now, there are no back steps. If you drove past my house and happened to notice a woman dressed in yoga pants with uncombed hair and a neon green tee-shirt two sizes too big which read “Minnesota: Gone Loony”, it was not a burglar, an escapee from a psychiatric facility, or a lost tourist. It was just me, a Farm Woman who realized a millisecond too late that she accidentally hit the lock button on the new front door. Even more frightening, and I am perhaps giving a little too much information here, but that outfit, or a similar one, is what I sleep in every night. Now, if you knew how hard HE has been working on this project, you would understand just why I didn’t want to wake him up at that hour by pounding on the door. The door to the dining room was locked securely, of course. I could have walked around to the side of the house to the French doors that lead into our bedroom, but there are no steps built yet and only the skeleton of a new deck, so I couldn’t even get close. Besides, that door would be locked up tighter than Fort Knox because I checked it before going to bed last night. Thankful that I was wearing slippers and even more thankful that it wasn’t January, I walked around to the back door as a last resort, almost forgetting that those steps are gone and the door is three feet off the ground. I was amazed to find that door unlocked, thankful and yet wondering if I had forgotten to check it in my nightly security rounds. I managed to crawl inside and into the construction zone with no injury except to my pride and none the worse for wear except a little dust on my backside. There is one thing I happened to notice, though. Each door now has two locks, so now I have TEN locks to check every night. I think I have finally succeeded in driving myself loony. It’s a good thing I already have the tee-shirt.