When my wife, Wendy, and I first started dating, there were certain things she never mentioned to me. Like questioning why I had boxes stacked chest high in my living room.

I pretended like I found musicals tolerable, while she pretended that it was normal for a human being to live at a place for a year and still have unpacked boxes around the house. She never questioned the dirty dishes, the coffee-stained shirts, the unabridged dictionary serving as a coffee table.

And then came marriage.

And I started falling asleep when she placed a musical in the DVD player, and she began telling me I needed to finally unpack. NOW.

Yes, sir ... I mean, ma’am.

Now we’ve packed those boxes again and moved to a new home and I’m wondering: Why did I ever unpack those boxes to begin with?

But you do things in marriage that you wouldn’t do in bachelorhood because of love, and fear.

For instance, since I’ve been out on my own, I’ve studiously avoided yard work. Saturday mornings as a kid were about mowing the lawn, trimming the hedges and doing other assorted tasks while my sisters sat around doing -- well, I don’t know what they were doing, but it wasn’t yard work.

I’m not a sexist. Women can push a mower just as well as a man can. It wasn’t like they were sitting around the pot-bellied stove, knitting clothes for winter, or canning or something.

By the time I reached adulthood, I figured out apartment living is the way to go -- give somebody a check and forget about it.

But, apparently, we weren’t going to live in an apartment throughout our marriage. A wedding ring doesn’t only come with a lifetime commitment to a woman. It also carries a 30-year commitment to a bank.

And with that commitment to a woman, and to the bank, comes a commitment to spend future Saturdays mowing the lawn, weeding the azaleas, trimming the hedges, touching up paint and other tasks.

Bachelorhood was about waking up Saturdays, watching cartoons, ordering takeout and climbing back into bed. If you were feeling froggy, you bathed. But most of the time, you weren’t feeling up to the task after a long Friday night. You reeked, and you didn’t care.

Now you wake up early with baby, get her fed, watered and shod, and head on back to work -- this time in the yard.

The bright side? As I see my little girl grow bigger and bigger, stronger and stronger and more coordinated, I know one day she’ll be able to mow my lawn.

Happy Saturdays will return soon.

T&D City Editor Gene Crider can be reached by e-mail at gcrider@timesanddemocrat.com or by phone at 803-533-5570.

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