Damn Cans

I try to stay helpful and basically chipper with my new husband.  But there are a few things in my new life that i cannot embrace.  Actually, one:  Washing out trash. Recycling.

Even when recycling became a passion of my students I could not do the disdainful task myself and assigned it to some zealot in my classroom.  At home, I felt lucky when my son Charlie even got around to taking the trash out.  Usually he did it only after I promised him he would never drive my car again, not even to have a rupturing appendix removed.  Recycling?  Not gonna happen.

Is it any wonder the sight of my husband RINSING OFF A PAPER PLATE was like seeing an alien spaceship land on earth?  I could not wrap my head around it.  He does not know this, but my mouth hung open.  I loved him for being so perfect, but I had never seen the likes.  So instead of embracing his actions, I pretended I could not speak the language that was coming out of his mouth, the language that told me we had to SORT AND SEPARATE THE TRASH BECAUSE WE DID NOT HAVE TRASH PICK UP.  WE had to take it to the trash hauler OURSELVES.  I remember hearing him say we had to RINSE CANS.  And I remember thinking to myself the "we" he was referring to must be his deceased wife and him.  I also remember thinking we do have trash pick up.  It was called David Kost, and if David couldn't do it, I was willing to wait for my son, Charlie to come home from the Navy to do it.  I began leaving cans that needed rinsing on the counter.  I would see David come in for dinner, look at the cans, and somehow, magically, the next day the cans were rinsed and in the recycling box.  This seemed like an excellent system. It worked.  Problem solved.

Except last night I ruined it.  I felt a little guilty because David came home late, and there were two salmon cans that needed rinsing along with an entire dishwasher I had not gotten around to unloading.  Please note, I am hopping around on one leg right now after knee surgery.   If I had just kept my mouth shut, I would still have a garbage system in place that was mostly effortless for me. But when I'm guilty I blabber, so I blurted:  I don't know what you want me to do with those cans! Then I watched David to see if he would get his cue correctly.  He did not. 

I saw his head wag.  There was a little disgust thing going on, and confusion, like how can anything so simple be so difficult for the person he once imagined to have some brains in her head...is she really that dense...???!!! All of that flickered across his face and came out in the following statement, which was delivered in such clear, clipped English I could not pretend I didn't understand the language.  "You rinse it; you wash it out just like it was a dish or a plate, then you put it in the recycling box."  All this spoken with a head wag, an incriminating shake of his handsome head. 

Something ugly entered our picture, something that required an action, a choice.  He thought I was dense, and I had to decide if avoiding doing the trash was worth it to me to let him believe that. 
Ordinarily, in any other relationship, I would keep on keeping on.  But in this second marriage of mine, I have sworn to myself and my God that I will always tell the truth to my husband.  So I can't let this little snarky game take hold.  Even though I didn't mean to start it, even though I didn't mean for it to be snarky, even though looking at it from the outside makes me laugh now.  Even though I hate garbage.  Even though sometimes when David says "we/our" out of habit he is thinking of his first wife, it is this second wife of his who cooked his favorite salmon patties.  Better get my saucy little ass in gear and scrub out those cans. 

I can't wait to tell him what a silly little piece of work I am.  For him to know my language skills can come and go at will.  I can't wait for him to know me that way, for us to laugh together about who we are as husband and wife, for us to add color to the journey.  If being wife to David adds so much to my happiness, I guess a sack or so of garbage each week is more than worth it.   At least we can laugh pretty hard every time we clean off a paper plate.  And that's what is going to make this marriage so much fun.