About a week before each Open House, things begin to change around the farm.

My wife walks into doors, forgets keys, thinks she fed the dogs but didn’t, worries about the cats,  talks in tongues, berates herself for not spending more time with her pony, confers with donkeys, screeches to a halt in her car to move turtles. Tables and chairs disappear in one room, appear in another. There is much mumbling and sitting up like the Exorcist Child at 3 a.m., head spinning around, announcing things that must be done.

She forgers her name, sometimes she forgets mine. “Do you still love me?,” she will ask suddenly, then vanish before I can answer. “Why did you ask me if I still love you?,” I ask. “Did I?,” she answers. She is no longer interested in the answer.

Moods change, sometimes with astonishing frequency, she can be sweet one minute, paranoid and delusional the next. Can you help me assemble the new grill?, I ask. Can’t you see I’m busy, she growls? Two seconds later, she is reading the directions.  It is nothing unusual, nothing to worry about.

“Did I feed the dogs?,” she will ask. “Did I water the plants? Will I forget something for the Open House?  Will the artists come on time? Do I have time to do everything I need to do?” Yes, yes, yes, yes and yes. I say yes a lot before the Open House. It will be all right. You are doing well.

“Am I okay?,” she asked after breakfast. Yes, I say, you are good.

Another sign of an impending Open House is something you don’t often see around the farmhouse – my wife carrying a mop. It isn’t that she doesn’t do chores, she zips around the house like a demon sometimes, sweeping and moving things, but she tends to avoid things that evoke women taking care of men or being servile to them.

But by tomorrow, her studio will gleam like a Martha Stewart kitchen floor, the dog hair, dust, threads and debris from a thousand creations swept away and hauled to the dump. The good people who visit us will never know, they think it’s always like that.

She remembers some things, not others. We pulled sharply into the Rite-Aid parking lot to buy chalk today, so we can put a schedule of events up for the Open House this weekend. Not something she would ordinarily remember. She will freak out about making change for people who buy art sometime Friday morning. We will rush to the bank. It is on  her list.

She doesn’t like household chores. She is not servile to men, and she is not servile to me.

By and large, she is not crazy about men, although she sometimes concedes I am okay to be married too. Sometimes not.

That is not to say she is not loving, being servile to men are not the same things. During Open House week, she is not all that loving, if you are not a dog or a donkey or a pony, or a tree or bush. She does confide in Fate, they confer all the time.

It isn’t because she doesn’t care- once or twice she will look at me during the day and blink at me, as if I just stepped out of a spaceship and walked into the house. She is trying to remember.

Her look says, “who are you anyway, and what are you doing hanging around here, I’m thinking about where the art goes?” Once in awhile, she even says it out loud.

Just me, I say, I live here, the big writer with his dog.

I understand that I am strange  in my own right, and do and say many strange things also. We couldn’t survive together otherwise.

But on Open House week, I feel especially normal, even ordinary. I get to be the sane one, I get to be  Ricky Ricardo.