CHANGE IS...GOOD?

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Things are changing. And it’s making me nervous.

Every time I come home, things are in new places. Tables have moved rooms. Food is on a different shelf. It’s like each day I return home to a parallel universe in my home.

This happens in my house periodically. My wife goes through these phases, and when these moods come, it is best for me to clear out for extended periods of time and come back in after the dust settles.

The first time I noticed that she had these needs for change was a few years ago. I went out of town for a weekend, and when I returned I found our bedroom was an entirely different color. A dark color. A maroon. It looks great, mind you, but it’s a bit of a shock to come home from a weekend and find your previously white walls the color of a cranberry. As I stood there looking at the walls, mouth agape, my wife said, “Do you like it!?!?!”

“Uh...yes?” I said. I did ? and still do ? like it, but it was still a shock. Besides, I can imagine the response had I said, “No. Change it back.” I bet it would have involved the remaining paint.

A while passed after that until my wife grew restless again. The next time something major happened was when she switched the furniture in our kitchen with the furniture in our sun room. Imagine my surprise at seeing a dishwasher in the sunroom.

Kidding, of course. We have a little extended section in our kitchen that some people call a “breakfast nook,” but I cannot bring myself to say I am eating in the “breakfast nook.” I’ll just stick with extra kitchen. So she moved the table from the extra kitchen into the sunroom, and moved a sofa and chair into the extra kitchen. And it was good. We had a nice little cozy sitting area, and we also had a table in the sunroom that we could use to pile up thousands and thousands of blocks and coloring books. (We dine standing.) While that was not the original intent of the table, we have found that flat surfaces have this amazing magnetic property that attracts kids’ things. Set a coffee table in a kid’s room and it will be hidden in less than four minutes.

So we lived in this manner for a while. And then something just happened with my wife. The urge to change swept over her. I came home from work one day and went to sit down on my extra kitchen couch only to find that my extra kitchen no longer housed a couch, but rather the original table that we had once grown tired of. “Honey,” I cried out in as helpless a voice as possible, “the sofa’s gone.”

“Just sit at the table,” she said.

Ah-ha!

She had switched the rooms back to the old way, which I guess means that enough time had passed that we had forgotten what it used to be like, so it was new again.

But her plans do not stop there. I have been told that in the near future, I will come home to find (a) our office moved downstairs, into the sunroom (b) the kid’s computer moved to my desk and (c) my wife’s office supplies moved into what she refers to as her “craft closet” and what I refer to as “the place I never go, because I have no use for 43,000 pairs of scissors.”

Notice there is no reference to where my desk will be. I have apparently been downsized. Perhaps I will find myself moved out into the garage, near the water heater, perhaps.

I am sure that my wife knows what she is doing. Each time she reinvents our home, it is always better than it was before, even if it is exactly how it was before, which is a trick that I still don’t comprehend. Whatever she does, I will embrace it fully though, since she still has paint left over.