To love, honor, and pick up the glass shards.

When Steve married me, he signed on for a lifetime of picking up after me. Not that I'm a particularly messy person. To the contrary, I'm the one who usually declutters our house, and it's his closet that has the volcanic eruption of clothing spilling out of it. But I'm blind, and I move too fast, and our kitchen is tiny. So I break stuff, and spill things, and make impossible awful messes, a lot.

Saturday night, I sent a full glass of cranberry juice into a lethal red mess on the kitchen floor. I was reaching for a bottle of wine to deglaze my saucepan, and forgot I had put the glass on the counter. I was barefoot and afraid to move, because in our dim kitchen, all I could see were the bigger pieces of glass and the puddle of liquid. Steve came to the rescue.

A few weeks ago, I ruined our entire meal by colliding my hand into a pint glass sitting next to the sink. It sprayed shards all over the vegetables I was cutting and as far away as the pot of pasta boiling on the stove. Then, too, Steve took over, patiently combing the kitchen for every last speck of glass.

If the Green Bay Packers' 4-12 record this past season wasn't bad enough, I managed to shatter TWO of Steve's precious Packer memorabilia. I cracked one of his Packer glasses during my holiday cookiethon, and the only ornament I was clumsy enough to drop during the undecorating of our Christmas tree was, of course, a Packer orb. Steve swept up the mess with gritted teeth. I'm hoping he'll forgive me by next Christmas.

My mishaps extend beyond glass. Tonight, I knocked a full bag of flour out of the freezer (don't ask me why we keep flour in the freezer - that's Steve's habit). It landed neatly on its head on the floor, making the cleanup less than awful (and Steve managed to salvage most of the flour, too). I also crash into the corners of our tables and display pieces constantly, upending picture frames and sending tchotchkes to the floor.

I try to be careful. I try to remind myself when I've set a glass down somewhere, and to keep my hands up in my field of vision when I'm moving things around. I try to look first, then act, but I get caught up in what I'm doing. I relax into my bustling culinary routine, and I forget the hazards that are quick hands and dim eyes.

Poor Steve. I think he knew what he was getting into, but it won't surprise me if I come home someday to find the Riedel wine glasses replaced with these.