It’s good to try a little role reversal in your marriage every once in a while. If not just for the learning experience, but the revelations that always seems to come with it.

For the last 10 years I’ve been the keeper of the laundry: sorting, washing, folding, putting it away, and tossing out holey socks. Once after a particularly hectic period of farming, my husband noticed he didn’t have many mated socks in his drawer. “Guess it’s time to buy some more,” he muttered as he crawled into bed.

I looked at the big stack of his dirty socks in the basket of whites. Wow, I wish I had magic drawers like he does – continuously restocking his clean clothes, folded or mated, until the time he needed to buy more. Sighing, I picked up the laundry basket and headed to the washing machine before crawling into bed beside my already snoring husband.

So recently we decided to try a little role reversal. In the evenings, I climb into bed with a book and my husband trudges downstairs with the laundry baskets. After the first load, he became frustrated as he tried putting them away in our shared chest of drawers.

“Where am I supposed to put this?” he grumbled.

I couldn’t help but smirk: “Welcome to my world, why do you think I fold the laundry vertically? I can fit more in that way.”

He grumbled and muttered, and soon the laundry baskets became home to the clean laundry.

After only two weeks, he came home grinning like a school boy. He had purchased a gorgeous dresser and chest of drawers.

“If I’m gonna do laundry, there’s gotta be a place to put it!”

The new bedroom furniture was beautiful, but I couldn’t help but remember how he’d thought our one old dresser was satisfactory – until he had to use it. Hmm …

Not long after that, I sat down at the computer and noticed a web page of riding mowers. Years ago, we had an old riding mower, one that needed TLC every time I started it. The tire had 4 plugs and a bottle of green goop, and still wouldn’t hold air; the battery wouldn’t hold a charge; the ignition didn’t work; and you couldn’t push the clutch and brake at the same time because of a linkage problem.

One day after 45 minutes of tinkering and a hand that was still smarting from the shock when I tried to spark across the battery with a screwdriver, I muttered “I’d get this lawn mowed faster with a push mower!”

Guess what arrived weeks later … for Mother’s Day. Yep, my very own push mower.

And if that wasn’t enough, my husband hired out my mowing services to a neighbor widow to pay for my new Mother’s Day present. And now I see, that after only one time of using my push mower, he’s in the market for a riding mower.

I thought about the time I was driving combine with a sprained foot; I had an air-cast and was on crutches. The combine’s air conditioner was broken, and it was so hot the chickens would have laid boiled eggs. To keep the swelling down in my foot, I used a bucket of ice. The glassed cab of that combine was a sauna and I was constantly wiping the sweat (and chaff) out of my eyes.

“The season’s almost done,” my husband said when I complained. “I don’t want to have to charge the AC, just for a few days before I park it for the winter.”

The second to last day of harvest, I went on a parts run while he climbed into the combine. Imagine my surprise a few hours later when I saw the combine parked in the yard … and the AC man working on it.

My eyes narrowed as I stared at the screen of pretty new John Deere riding mowers. Then I thought, maybe I was looking at this all wrong. I knew this role reversal wouldn’t last forever, and soon I would be doing the laundry and mowing my own yard – and those neighbors have an awfully big yard that needs mowing. If I play my cards right, I can get a riding mower – and have my husband work it off.

Brianna Walker writes about the Farmer’s Fate occasionally for the Blue Mountain Eagle.