I’ve started keeping a tally, which is the surest sign a thing has caught my curiosity and won’t quit.

The phrase is “my husband.” Women here say it constantly. My husband put up the fence. My husband won’t touch squash. My husband’s people are all out toward Winlock. Not Dave, not Ron, not whoever he actually is. My husband. And said to people who, as far as I can tell, already know exactly which husband is meant, because this is a town where everyone knows whose husband is whose.

I never heard it in Tigard. I’m sure it happened. But it never landed on me as a pattern there, and here it landed pretty quickly as I got to know various women in the area.

So of course I went looking, because that’s what I do when something snags.

It turns out linguists have a tidy little rule for this. You say “my husband” to someone who can’t place the name, and you use the name with someone who can. The phrase is supposed to earn its keep by telling a stranger who this man is to you. By that logic a small town should be wall to wall first names. Everybody already knows. The name does all the work.

Which is exactly the part I keep turning over. If you say “my husband” to a woman who has known the man for thirty years, you aren’t telling her one new thing. So the phrase is doing something other than pointing him out. It’s keeping the marriage in the sentence. It puts him and what he is to you into the room together, every single time he comes up.

You can hear it two ways, and people do. On one end it sounds like a small claim, a flag planted on a man who already has a name. Here is mine, and he is accounted for. On the other end it sounds like the reverse, a kind of reverence, keeping him held back a little, not handing his name around to just anyone. Territory on one side, respect on the other, the very same two words for both. I suspect most of the women saying it mean neither. It’s just the local water, the way some people say the wife, and the meaning floats around the phrase whether anyone put it there or not.

In Tigard I was a person who happened to be married. I’m starting to think Toledo is a place where being somebody’s wife is a thing you say out loud, the way you’d say where your people are from.

Here’s the part that unsettles me. I’ve started catching myself doing it. It slips out at the market, my husband this and my husband that, and it sits wrong every time, like a coat that isn’t mine. I’ve called him Eric since before he was my husband, and Eric is the name I’d rather say. But a place gets into your speech before it asks permission.

My husband thinks I’m overthinking it.

(There it is. It’s already happening.)