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Our Time: Having a 'wife' for part of year proves beneficial

By Jane Glenn Haas, The Orange County Register, Source: MCT News Service

My friend Carolyn is here for her annual four-month escape.

She lives in Fort Collins, Colo., and delights in comparing daily temperatures in Colorado and California.

And I depend on Carolyn's visit to tidy up my life.

She's a "wife" and, frankly, I'm not.

By that I mean Carolyn cooks dinner every night _ including salad and vegetables. She cleans up the kitchen two or three times a day.

She drives here with an assortment of stuff, including family snapshots on a "tree" for her bedroom. She sorts the medicine chest in her bathroom.

Everything faces the same way.

"We might as well do it now as do it later," she says as she carries out trash or eggs me into sorting my laundry.

For eight months of the year, I live a more casual lifestyle.

I never cook a meat, potatoes, vegetables dinner for myself. It seems overkill. Sometimes I don't eat dinner at all if I'm alone. Other times, I rely on grocery cases featuring ready-made salads and other prepared foods. I'm not a big fan of most frozen dinners.

I have an excellent cleaning woman to make my house habitable.

No, that doesn't mean my place is piled high with trash when Celina arrives to clean. Not at all. It does mean that I do not scrub floors anymore. It is a reward I give myself because, I reason, I've earned it.

Carolyn would rather do her own cleaning than pay someone for it. She will spend an hour cutting up sheets of printed business cards rather than pay

$15 for Kinko's to do the task.

Then she will spend $7 on a vegetable chopper for my kitchen.

As I said, she's a "wife."

I was a wife, too. A wife and the mother of three children.

I brought home the bacon and cooked it up long before being a working mom was fashionable or acceptable or commonplace.

I will admit _ there's a difference between being a "wife" and a wife. The closest I got to being a "wife" was the summer I canned tomatoes and made elderberry jam.

But that was the "summer of love," when I had long, straight hair and wore raspberry-colored jeans with a woven Indian belt.

Despite my casual attitude toward "wifeyness," my children flourished. And the men in my life didn't complain. They had a casual attitude also.

Which takes nothing away from Carolyn. Indeed, it enhances her role.

If not for Carolyn, when would I clean out my freezer? Or get rid of the stale stuff in my pantry? Or finally learn how to load my dishwasher to the maximum?

Carolyn lets me tease her about her "wifely" attitude.

I let her feed the dogs every morning.

We are the quintessential odd couple, and we probably succeed at this arrangement simply because it only lasts for four months _ and I have more than one TV, so we can each watch our favorite shows.

Being a "widow couple" is the next best thing to marriage. You have someone to talk to _ and someone to talk about.

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(Jane Glenn Haas writes for The Orange County (Calif.) Register. E-mail her at jghaas@cox.net)

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(c) 2010, The Orange County Register (Santa Ana, Calif.).

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