My husband is a genius, even when other people would normally sleep. He takes passing thoughts or half-fantastical epiphanies and realizes them. Take the canoe, which came about as a response to “Why hasn’t David built a boat yet?” that hasn’t been asked by anyone but David, but it must seem mightily pressing to him. It would.

You know those dizzy conversations you have at small parties or TV show nights with your Smart Friends and everyone comes up with a Great Idea and then there’s lots of discussion about how rad it would be to build, say, your own canoe? You could even find plans on the Internet. The rest of us go pass out burping white wine fumes but David stays up until 3a.m. trying to decide what kind of plywood to buy for the canoe.

Three days later there’s something that looks kind of like a canoe in our yard, propped up on our yard furniture. No one’s surprised. Or, maybe everyone is surprised but me. David is doggedly painting it with fiberglass, trying to beat the rain, the smell of it so scorching that I think it’s frying our mucus.

The problem that arises in all of this is a matter of storage. He built a greenhouse to contain his fifty million species orchids and his utopian hydroponics system that uses tilapia poop to fertilize plants. We built a shed to hold the tools and equipment and chemicals and attachments necessary for these wonders of creation.

But there’s still the canoe, and the pieces of his spherical speaker project, and his visions of vanilla plantations and a low-yield organic vineyard somewhere in what remains of our half-sized lot with northern exposure.

It’s my hunch that this is why he is suddenly so keen to buy an admittedly cute-shabby building on Williams Avenue that’s for sale. His interest in it takes the pretense of some sort of magically unique business opportunity, but really I think he just wants to put stuff in it. I suggested opening a bookstore and coffee shop in it because I hear that’s a real lucrative business. He thinks this is a Terrible Idea, which it is, but I’m not the one trying to design and manufacture a cordless backpack vacuum. I love David.