Forced to go Fishing!
And so he was confused when, one fine sunny day last summer, I marched up to his hammock, fishing pole in hand and demanded that he go fishing - immediately.
This is not the sort of order a man usually gets, even with a wife who really is a nag. And I have to admit, he didn't even hesitate, but did exactly what I asked - or rather, as I commanded.
The whole thing was his fault. My husband can be very generous. He never showed even the slightest tendency to protest when I came home with a car full of somewhat expensive waterlilies for the new pond. Just as he didn't blink at the cost of the liner and bog plants. He blinked a little at the high cost of lotuses - but they sounded so exotic to him that he got over THAT in mere seconds.
And he was absolutely wonderful about having to go buy a wetsuit and then wade into the chilly spring pond water to get all the water plants into the right spots in the pond, at the correct depth. All we needed then were the fish. We had calculated to the inch exactly what ratio of plants to fish to water were needed for maximum water clarity.
Maybe it was all that not blinking that did it - but when it came time to get those fish, suddenly he went cheap on me.
One of his friends constantly takes his four year old son fishing in the nearby creek - and my husband thought it would be just dandy if they would capture some of those free fish to make our water garden complete.
Quite honestly, all I had planned to do was go to the pet store and get a sandwich baggie full of "feeder" goldfish. At twenty for a dollar it seemed reasonable economical to me. But apparently somewhere in my husband's mental calculator, that was one dollar too much.
I had to admit that the small-mouth bass they brought over were nice looking. I had a few inner qualms about their eventual size, but my husband swore that fish grow to match the size of their environment, but no more. Our pond being considerably smaller than wherever they came from, he was convinced that they were the perfect solution for the "fish" portion of our ecological balancing act.
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