A carefully crafted to-do list is a thing of beauty. Its creation is an exercise in organizing that separates the men from the boys, the doers from the layabouts. My personal farm to-do list gets updated each Friday morning without fail. I turn on the computer and pull up the previous week’s document, spend a few minutes deleting the accomplished tasks, adding new ones and shuffling unfinished ones within and between the long-, mid-, and short-term goals, and then print. What could be simpler?

In print, of course, the list is highly successful: it’s neatly laid out, just waiting to be put into action. That some items remain long enough to become fossilized, I am aware. Those tasks become like river rocks, highly polished before being ground into sand by the swift-flowing currents of time and good intentions.

And so it has been, since May of 2019, for items 3 and 4 on the short-term to-dos:

• Set up wire/waterer in wooded pig paddock; rebuild shelter.
• Chainsaw cedars that have fallen across pig fencing.

Items of such long standing become affectionate companions, even age into venerability. For tasks 3 and 4, there had been a comfort in knowing they were both on the list and yet had no urgency to tackle, even as they malingered in the “complete now or within 14 days” company. The wooded paddock remained empty of pigs, after all; hence, there was no stock to contain or care for. So the tasks remained, week after week becoming month after month, occasionally moving down the short-term queue, occasionally (in moments of wild optimism) moving up to the top.

Ultimately though, the day did come — along with a trailer load of weanling pigs — when numbers 3 and 4 needed quick and decisive action. Although I had been repeatedly forewarned in the preceding weeks of the piglets’ impending arrival, I had felt comfortable postponing. These were small tasks, easily achievable with the minimum of time and effort.

Saturday morning, the mercury at 20, found me restringing electric wire, pounding posts into frozen ground, cursing the Aesopian-grasshopper instincts that had left me unprepared to adequately welcome the new piglets. That my electric fence charger had finally disintegrated after 15 years in the elements and the chainsaw coughed and shuddered at starting in the cold … well, neither improved my opinion of that lazy farmer who had postponed these simple tasks for nine months.

Finally, after completing what should have been a two-hour project in six hours, I returned to the house and crossed off items 3 and 4. Then, after a moment’s reflection on the lessons learned, I took up my master list and made a few adjustments. By moving items 5-8, which had also been on the short-term list for months, to the mid-term category (15 to 90 days), I bought myself not only time but also self-respect. Genius! I do love a good to-do list.

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Reading this week: A Very Stable Genius (Rucker & Leoning), The Biggle Swine Book (Biggle), The Third Plate (Barber)

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