Lately JellyBean has been very concerned. She will plop herself down next to me and say, with great urgency, “Please don’t hurt my brother!”

It is kinda sweet. Except that JellyBean doesn’t have a brother.

(And trying to type that word “except” I just typed “expect” instead.)

I have terrible springtime allergies. The trees that I love are my biological enemy. Fortunately drugs work, though I settle for surgical masks when I’m pregnant. Since this is the first spring in years that I have not been pregnant or nursing, I decided to drug up and attack the invasive plants in our woods.

The native forests of our part of the Midwest are being taken over by invasive plants. Our particular plot is overrun with honeysuckle, wild grapevine, english ivy and euonymous. The honeysuckle produces a chemical at its roots that prevents new trees from successively growing so that it can form freestanding groves of honeysuckle. The grapevine strangles the trees that are already grown. Attacking them with big clippers can’t kill all the invasives, but I can slow them down a little. It’s my own little Alamo.

So I was marching back toward the house after a sneezy job well-done, when I almost fell in a hole. A big stinky hole. I never would have noticed it if I hadn’t been back there pruning. It smelled like, to use the word appropriately, shit. So I called the the sewer district. They came out and gave me some dye tablets to flush down my toilet. The hole turned neon green.

So all you homeowners know the sinking feeling I got in my stomach. The hole was too far away from the manhole to be the city’s responsibility. It was mine. So I got a recommendation from a contractor friend for a good plumber, and called.

$1700 to dig up and replace six feet of sewer pipe. Our neighbor told us that the previous owners of our house laid “new” pipe four years ago. We discovered the hard way what that meant. Instead of replacing a pipe that had broken, the previous owners wrapped the broken pipe with sheet metal and then surrounded it with concrete. In case it’s not clear to you, that method doesn’t work. The concrete broke, a big piece got stuck in the pipe, and the back-up from the clog made the hole. We were lucky it didn’t back-up into the house.

I sometimes think about the expense of home ownership, and whether we can really afford it. Stuff like this hurts us, and hurts our pride even more, because it often means taking help from family. But then I think about how happy I am here, and what it was like to live in an apartment. I love our home. It is a simple place, and I am more at peace here than anywhere in my life. Even with a few sacrifices, it is a place that brings us joy.

As long as we keep the shit under control.

This comes as a surprise to no one.

I have been grumpily resenting the husband today. He has again contracted pink eye, or as I like to call it, the Infection That Will Not Go Away. Not really his fault, but I’m feeling blamey, and he could do a little better (Wash your hands! No, twenty seconds under running water. Stop touching your eyes! Don’t touch the baby!). Heaven help us if there is a real influenza plague next year.

So I thought I would fondly recall his good qualities, and naturally, that involves books. We met in graduate school, and he would let me borrow a large expensive tome of no interest except to people in our specialty. I knew he must love me when, on days that I procrastinated, he would let me wake him before my 8 am class so I could use his books and do my homework. And I am just calculating enough to have considered, during our arguments, that if I broke up with him, I could not use his books anymore. Fortunately for us, that was incentive enough to stay together on the bad days.

Then there was the summer I turned 27. I was in my favorite bookstore, browsing in the literature section, and I found Anne Fadiman’s book of essays Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader. I loved the physicality of the book: pale green and yellow bookjacket that felt almost silky smooth on my fingertips, the perfect size and heft to fit comfortably in one hand. Just right to be carried unobtrusively to any bookless place where there might be lots of waiting. I started leafing through it, and I was hooked. I stood unmoving in that bookstore for almost an hour, gobbling Fadiman’s prose, until other demands made me leave.

When my husband asked me what I wanted for my birthday that year — a year when any purchase would cost us dearly — I named Fadiman’s book. So he drove me to the bookstore, we bought the book, and we drove to a favorite park with a beautiful garden. He and I sat on a bench under a rose arbor in full bloom and he first read me poems like John Donne’s “A Fever” and “To His Mistress Coming to Bed.” Then I leaned against him, and he cracked open Ex Libris and read “Marrying Libraries.”

Fadiman’s first essay describes the jumble of possessions when two booklovers marry. “We were both writers, and we both invested in our books the kind of emotion most people reserve for old love letters.” After years of housing two libraries separately under one roof, Fadiman and her husband finally decide to combine their books and discard the duplicates, a drastic act of commitment. “I realized that we had both been hoarding redundant copies of our favorite books ‘just in case’ we ever split up.”

After living for years in a small apartment into which each of us crammed our books, all the while resenting the space taken up by the other’s, we knew the commitment she was talking about. I love the husband dearly, but to this day I sometimes think that the up side of being a widow would be finally getting rid of his stuff. He rarely gets rid of anything, so when the house becomes too full of books even for me, I have the bitter task of weeding out my own personal books for the resale shop. Marriage is satisfying, but not just.

I have heard other people complain about the clutter of a house full of books, saying, “Oh, I would not put up with that. Those would have to go.” Put up with? Philistine. An old friend of mine, whose marriage was going through rocky times, told me that her husband had kindly made her a lovely bookshelf to hold her books. But he was horrified when she still bought more. Apparently she was not supposed to own more books than the bookshelf would hold. I can see why that marriage was doomed.

Fadiman’s other essays are equally delicious. She is a booklover who writes equally enthusiastically about perusing catalogs. The “Catalogical Imperative,” she calls it. Her book is delightful from beginning to end, and written to be easily read aloud, a skill most writers don’t manage. I love her work for its own merits, but also because when I think of Ex Libris, I am always transported back to that rose arbor, leaning against the husband, hearing Fadiman’s prose keeping time to the beating of his heart.

Sweetpea was crawling around the floor today today and found a wasp. We get them inside occasionally, especially in the spring, when they are drowsy and slow-moving. She must have found it and tried to touch it, because it stung her on the wrist.

We were eating dinner while she was playing and suddenly she started wailing. The husband saw the wasp and killed it. I comforted Sweetpea. And I was a little disappointed that he killed her attacker in one squish. The thing made Sweetpea cry, and I wanted to twist its little body into excruciating torment, look into its eyes and say, “This is for hurting my baby.” And then murder it. Horribly. None of which is really an option for an insect. Revenge may be a dish best served cold, or it may be sweet, but mostly it’s just anti-climactic. At least when it’s a bug.

I think I will have to conquer this urge before she starts dating, or I may be littering the Midwest with bodies.