Jill likes to write. She writes and edits and wins awards. I can’t write, as I’ll prove right here. I’ve decided to make her nervous. I picked up her laptop for no reason and started writing. I made sure she knew I was writing about her.

We’re in Barnes and Noble, where we go when we don’t want to spend one more minute looking at all the work we should be doing. Jill gets all kinds of books on relationships and reads every one of them. She says, “Would you read this?“ I say, “Sure,“ but I rarely do. She gets frustrated and says, “Here, I brought this book for you to read,” when we go to Starbucks.

It’s not that I don’t want to read these books, it’s that I’m always reading something else. Sometimes when I read the Bible, she makes comments like, “You‘ll read the Bible, but you won‘t read about communicating. You may think you’re perfect, but no matter how long you look, you’re not going to find your name in there.”

Today I met her for lunch, where we were doing some communicating about scheduling. Apparently I wasn’t on her timeline. She told me, “Jesus only needed three years to do all his work. You‘ve got a long way to go, buddy.”

She laughs, and I start laughing louder. We both laugh so loud we annoy most people we know. We don’t care.

She’s diligent about protecting our relationship. She makes sure we communicate. I admire that in her. She is so incredibly honest. These things are important when you live in a pile of what once was a decent but dated Ranch-style house. You could hide a lot of frustration in the dust and debris around here if you’re not careful.

We couldn’t be more different in our political views. She makes good points in some of the things she says. She won’t, however, let me watch Fox news anymore. I have to watch CNN Headline News or one of the local news feeds.

Even so, when a news story begins, she tells me her version. She explains what she thinks about it and drowns out the TV. I end up only hearing her version and what she thinks about it. I don’t mind because Jill is pretty fair and balanced.

The only time I watch the History channel, her least favorite, is when I’m sick and she feels sorry for me, when she’s not around, or when I’m giving her a back rub. We have a rule that whoever rubs gets to watch what they want.

Before that, we used to have two remotes. We used up a lot of batteries dueling over who could flip the fastest. Now we have to share because the General, the fifteen year-old commando who shares our house, stole my remote and quickly lost it. Cheyenneh says she didn’t do it on purpose but she hates the History channel more than Jill.

Jill has a running injury. She runs like a deer on hard asphalt and it eventually caught up with her. She has plantar fasciitis, a heel spur on her left foot. It’s a painful heel injury. It took me a month to talk her into going to the Doctor. Even so, I ended up calling the Doctor because she kept making excuses instead of making an appointment.

Once she was told she could get a cortisone shot, she relented and went. Her heel still makes her limp so, once again, I‘m threatening to call the Doctor if she doesn‘t do it soon.

I used to say she was stubborn. I got the idea she didn’t like this description of her. She said, “I‘m determined, not stubborn. You don‘t want to be around someone who doesn‘t believe in what they think enough to stand up for it.” If her foot gets any worse, she won‘t be able to stand up at all.

General Cheyenneh and Jill have many things in common. One hard-to-ignore physical attribute is that they make the same identical face when they’re upset. It’s easy to figure out when you’ve made either one of them angry. They both make the same face when I pause at watching the History channel too long.

I’m staring at the laptop right now, trying to think of what more to say. Jill looked over at me and said, “I’ll clean it up for you, don’t worry.“ If you live in a fixer, she‘s the kind of person with whom you want to live.

If you think I wrote this with all my extensive Florida education, think again. I didn’t even know “whom” is a real word.