The thing we worry about most (well, almost most) is loss of mental keenness. I mean finding the tax the forms suddenly opaque, really incomprehensible. Or having more trouble in recalling names, even of old friends standing right in front of us. Or forgetting big jobs that need to be done. In the last category, I pulled a great example last Saturday.

Last week Anne's and my present frenzied clean-up campaign turned up a mountain of junk for the dump, and I methodically filled up the back of the pickup. When I got back from the MOSA, Anne stood in the driveway with a wry smile. "I've found more to go," she said, pointing to three more bulging plastic bags and a pile of cardboard.

"No problem," said her pliant husband. "This time I'll take the SUV, just for variety." And I dutifully packed the back of the car with what Anne had found, plus some added oddments I turned up. That evening, we both laughed over it having been a two-dump-run day.

The next morning Anne walked that same pliant husband out to the garage and opened the car's rear hatch. There was the second load, still neatly packed. I hadn't made that second dump trip, but had no sense of not having done so. None at all.

Whoa! That was unsettling. Just what, I wondered, was going on with my hard wiring? Was the trip not taken a warning of worst to come, and maybe very suddenly? Was some circuit smoldering inside my head, getting ready to flare and short out? Was my personal think tank starting to shut down?

Scary stuff, that, especially for one who made his living with his head and still does a lot of speaking and writing. Suppose the basis for all that is on its way out. What then, Jim? With shame, I caught myself comparing me with poor John Keats, that brilliant poet dying young. He began a sonnet, "When I have fears that I shall cease to be/ Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain..."

Well, my brain's teeming, all right, though mostly with stuff not worth anybody's gleaning. But I do have some ideas I'd like to get outside before the lights go out. (And I do enjoy talking with you this way every week.) So I'm unnerved by the thought of loss of memory, even sudden wordlessness. And suppose some system failure extended to thinking, made me even unable to dialog with myself? Who or what would I be then? Holy crap!

All right, I know. I just forgot a dump run. And that's about enough about my heebie-jeebies. We all know that, unless body crashes before mind, all that bleak stuff is coming, I just hope it's a while off. Meanwhile, I'll make do and try to compensate for slippage.

I keep lists, of course. Anne and I both do. And not just we two. I found that out in the general store last week. I was there enjoying some of Tom Bouton's coffee. (For years I've been sipping the "Harvard Blend," though it hasn't made me a bit smarter.)

Over our steaming cups, I was telling Aida Ostapeck about making lists, and about the special pleasure Anne and I take in crossing off a job done. Then I confessed something. Sometimes we happen on a job that needs doing, but that's not on our list. We do it, but then we write that job on the list, after the fact, just for the pleasure of crossing it out.

Aida's eyes widened. "I do that, too!" she said. A quick survey revealed then that everyone in the store over fifty did the same thing. But not the pleasant youngsters that work there. They looked at us blankly when we surveyed them. Yes, they said, they made lists. But it seemed crazy to put something on after the fact, just for the pleasure of crossing it out.

Well, I'm still surveying, and I'll bet Aida is, too. When you one of us on the street, tell what you do, especially if you're past the half-century mark.

Anne and I have been leaning heavily on our list these days. As I told you last week, we're policing our property, trying to make it suitable for a wedding reception next month. One huge job is almost done: that re-fencing of Anne's garden, which could have qualified as an added trial for Hercules.

That job was prominent on the to-do list, but I made a bad mistake. I recorded it as a single item. In fact, it should have been subdivided into about a dozen or more items, making for lots of crossings-out.

The first phase was removal of the ugly old fence, not a single job, but a set of them. It involved detatching the rusty fencing from a score of steel t-bar posts, then pulling the posts, then wrenching the fence free from the years of grass that had woven itself through the lowest wires. Then came crunching the rusty fencing into bundles, loading them on the truck, hauling them to the dump. You see? Phase One alone could have been a half-dozen separate entries made and then checked off.

Anyway, then came Phase two, digging the holes for those gargantuan new locust posts. (God bless Steve Guarneri and Todd Collier. Amen.) Phase Three was wrestling the posts into the holes, pounding them in place, packing around them with dirt and rocks. (More blessings on Steve and Todd.)

Phase Four you've already read about: my seeming dance in the field as I cut and flattened the lengths of new fence.

Then tedious Phase Five, as I positioned each section and wired it in place. Not to over-dramatize Five, but this new fence is eight feet high.

That has meant installing lengths of four-foot-high fencing around the 200-foot perimeter, and then standing on a stepladder to heighten the fence with second four-foot-high sections wired above the lower ones.

It's now clear that Phase Five should also have had a set of subentries on our list, each to be crossed out in turn. But, what had I done? Poor fool, I'd simply listed the whole job under "Put in new fence." I'd blocked Anne and me from a whole passel of gratifying crossings-out!

Yesterday morning I walked outside to admire the fence job, almost done. My wife was out there ahead of me, inside the fence, deciding what vegetables to plant next. I stood up the lawn, watching Anne moving around inside the eight-foot screening. She looked like an inmate let out for an hour in the exercise yard...

It's a huge, looming fence, you see. And if that monster doesn't keep the deer out, I don't know what comes next. Claymore mines, I guess.

Jim Atwell lives in and views life from Fly Creek. He can be found on the web at JimAtwell.com.