late afternoon at the indoor pool of the YMCA.
Nothing gets me hotter than nasal burning chlorine and swimming in kid pee. You?
2. Paint coffee mugs at a paint-your-own-pottery place.
Seriously? Coffee mugs? Shoot me now.
And my all time favorite:
1. Give each other haircuts. What can I say? I hope you have a pre-nup.
Marriage, Home Maintenance, and Imaginary Widowhood
I
F HUSBANDS WERE LOTTERY PRIZES , MINE — WITH HIS FAT paycheck, full head of Richard Gere hair, and sly smile—would be the Power Ball. He takes care of his kids, makes me laugh, and is great in bed. (Don’t tell him I said that—any of it.) Bonus: he’s handy. Not snake-the-toilet handy—Bob Vila handy.
His skills have saved us thousands over the years, and currently subsidize my twice-monthly housekeeper habit. John changes oil and brakes, makes filtered water flow, and spackles my drywall. He doesn’t complain about these jobs, which are always more difficult and time consuming than they should be.
He sighs and says, “Nothing’s ever easy.”
We fell in love with our house six years ago. Relocating from out of state, we had two harried realtors and forty-eight hours to make a decision. Our favorite feature was the two-story living room and its arched windows flooding light in every direction. We didn’t notice the six canister lights on the ceiling—twentyfive feet up—until some time after closing.
When we moved in I placed lamps all over the room and pretended the dull overhead lighting didn’t exist. We could have lived like that forever without changing a single bulb if John hadn’t insisted on using the damn things.
But you choose your battles. Especially when you live with the jackpot.
For years John pondered what to do at the first bulb fatality. When one of the easy-access lights in the kitchen popped, he replaced it at its ten-foot perch and sweated over the eventual death of one of those unreachable living room lights, trying to estimate how many hours of life remained. I humored him, joining debates over the relative merits of ladders versus scaffolding versus accessing the cans through the attic. It always ended with John imploring the cosmos, “Why the hell would anyone put lights up so high?”
It was immoral.
When the inevitable happened it hit him hard. John spent weeks looking at the ceiling, searching for his strategy. I discovered he’d opted for the attic route when I was folding laundry and a light casing crashed to the floor, accompanied by a grunt. He’d have to fix that now too.
But damn it, he’d changed the bulb!
He beamed coming down the stairs. The glow disappeared when he flipped the switch to find it still dead. He’d missed the location and replaced one perfectly good bulb with another. I reminded him that we didn’t need to turn on those lights. Ever. But he insisted, so we agreed to change them all at once. I suggested hiring a service. Once you pay someone to clean the toothpaste ring out of your bathroom sink, there’s not much you won’t outsource.
John wanted to do the job himself so we moved furniture and rugs, and leaned a borrowed ladder against the wall. Wanting to be as useful as my prize of a husband, I planned to do a thorough cleaning under the sofas where I expected to find entire colonies of dust loving creatures. All I found was the shiny wood flooring John installed last winter.
Clearly, the cleaning lady needed a raise.
As my devoted husband climbed, the ladder wobbled terribly. How could I not picture him plummeting to the floor like two hundred ten pounds of raw meat? I wondered what widowhood might look like. Adrenaline shot through my core as I realized I’d probably have to give up the housekeeper.
I noticed the weight limit on the shaky aluminum ladder: two hundred pounds. “Careful, Babe.”
We moved around the room, him taking new and old bulbs on each trip up and down the shaky ladder and me with my foot firmly wedged at its base. I knew that should
Nothing gets me hotter than nasal burning chlorine and swimming in kid pee. You?
2. Paint coffee mugs at a paint-your-own-pottery place.
Seriously? Coffee mugs? Shoot me now.
And my all time favorite:
1. Give each other haircuts. What can I say? I hope you have a pre-nup.
Marriage, Home Maintenance, and Imaginary Widowhood
I
F HUSBANDS WERE LOTTERY PRIZES , MINE — WITH HIS FAT paycheck, full head of Richard Gere hair, and sly smile—would be the Power Ball. He takes care of his kids, makes me laugh, and is great in bed. (Don’t tell him I said that—any of it.) Bonus: he’s handy. Not snake-the-toilet handy—Bob Vila handy.
His skills have saved us thousands over the years, and currently subsidize my twice-monthly housekeeper habit. John changes oil and brakes, makes filtered water flow, and spackles my drywall. He doesn’t complain about these jobs, which are always more difficult and time consuming than they should be.
He sighs and says, “Nothing’s ever easy.”
We fell in love with our house six years ago. Relocating from out of state, we had two harried realtors and forty-eight hours to make a decision. Our favorite feature was the two-story living room and its arched windows flooding light in every direction. We didn’t notice the six canister lights on the ceiling—twentyfive feet up—until some time after closing.
When we moved in I placed lamps all over the room and pretended the dull overhead lighting didn’t exist. We could have lived like that forever without changing a single bulb if John hadn’t insisted on using the damn things.
But you choose your battles. Especially when you live with the jackpot.
For years John pondered what to do at the first bulb fatality. When one of the easy-access lights in the kitchen popped, he replaced it at its ten-foot perch and sweated over the eventual death of one of those unreachable living room lights, trying to estimate how many hours of life remained. I humored him, joining debates over the relative merits of ladders versus scaffolding versus accessing the cans through the attic. It always ended with John imploring the cosmos, “Why the hell would anyone put lights up so high?”
It was immoral.
When the inevitable happened it hit him hard. John spent weeks looking at the ceiling, searching for his strategy. I discovered he’d opted for the attic route when I was folding laundry and a light casing crashed to the floor, accompanied by a grunt. He’d have to fix that now too.
But damn it, he’d changed the bulb!
He beamed coming down the stairs. The glow disappeared when he flipped the switch to find it still dead. He’d missed the location and replaced one perfectly good bulb with another. I reminded him that we didn’t need to turn on those lights. Ever. But he insisted, so we agreed to change them all at once. I suggested hiring a service. Once you pay someone to clean the toothpaste ring out of your bathroom sink, there’s not much you won’t outsource.
John wanted to do the job himself so we moved furniture and rugs, and leaned a borrowed ladder against the wall. Wanting to be as useful as my prize of a husband, I planned to do a thorough cleaning under the sofas where I expected to find entire colonies of dust loving creatures. All I found was the shiny wood flooring John installed last winter.
Clearly, the cleaning lady needed a raise.
As my devoted husband climbed, the ladder wobbled terribly. How could I not picture him plummeting to the floor like two hundred ten pounds of raw meat? I wondered what widowhood might look like. Adrenaline shot through my core as I realized I’d probably have to give up the housekeeper.
I noticed the weight limit on the shaky aluminum ladder: two hundred pounds. “Careful, Babe.”
We moved around the room, him taking new and old bulbs on each trip up and down the shaky ladder and me with my foot firmly wedged at its base. I knew that should
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