I put up a lot of sweet photos of Maria and her loving ways with our animals. I may be an ass but I am not a donkey and living with Maria is not as simple as loving a donkey. For one thing, she is not normal, she is an artist and she sees the world in a very particular way, she has a special frequency that most people cannot hear.  And when she locks onto something, you better get out of the way. We have just recovered from our socks battles (I asked her last week if there were any clean socks, and her response was classic: “do you really need clean socks every day?” And before you roll your eyes, I am not one of those men. Yes, she does the laundry (when she hasn’t thought of a new pillow design) but I do the shopping and the cooking.

It works out, more or less. Maria is not often seen in the kitchen, she helps chop up veggies for the pizza but mostly she uses the kitchen as a highway between her Studio and the house. For months, she has become fixated on our old and scrungy kitchen floor, which we think was put in around 1956 and is in a state of disintegration. This floor got into Maria’s head she hated it, thought it was disgusting, has been plotting in frustration to get rid of it. Maria was getting a big testy about the old floor, dropping repeated hints about how awful it was, how dirty it was, didn’t I see it? I admit I did suggest she was a tad anal, I did wonder if it could wait until Spring, I did say the kitchen had a grandma kind of charm about it, but she was neither convinced or amused.

Maria has repeatedly accused me of being insensitive to the awful condition of the floor and suggested I was putting way too many things ahead of replacing it (like buying food, fixing the lawn mower, wearing socks, buying groceries). Tuesday, as I lay sweating and groggy from 100 heat, I suggested buying a window air conditioner to help us survive global warming – this is the hottest summer I can ever remember up here – I saw the look in her eyes, that Sicilian look she gets when she things she is being thwarted by yet another blockhead man (this-what-on-earth-are-you-doing-in-my-house?-look.) I could almost hear her thinking, oh, there goes the money for the kitchen floor.  No honey, I grovelled, let’s call Joe and get him over her to estimate the new floor, I can wait until next summer for the air conditioner I said, as I slipped into the bathroom to look for the inhaler and wipe my  brow. Later, she said she had thought about it, and of course the air conditioner came first, I was uncomfortable, a kitchen floor was not as important as that. I was not fooled, she was only kidding. I said maybe we should get the floor done, and she said, okay, I’m happy with that.

She was skeptical right through the morning and kept the heat on.

It is impossible to clean the kitchen floor, she said this morning, as I made breakfast, you just don’t see the dirt, you don’t understand. No, no, I said, I do understand and I called Joe Darfur and begged him to get over here in a hurry. True, I don’t remember her cleaning the kitchen floor all that often, but this is nit-picking, I’m being small. Joe showed up just as I was leaving for my Tai Chi lesson and he and Maria were happily trading design ideas when I left. He was Maria’s kind of guy, he grasped the awfulness of the old floor right away and got right into the many tile and linoleum options. I could tell he loves working with artists, they have fun picking out the tiles and he doesn’t have to bother with it. I asked him if he noticed that artists were all crazy, and he pretended not to hear me.  It was going well, I was pleased to get out of there.

When I got home, it was like I was a donkey. Maria was happy to see me, purring like a kitten, showing me her tile designs she and Joe had worked things out, she liked the blue-gray tile combination,  we will get a new kitchen floor for a few hundred bucks (more than the price of a good air conditioner), marital bliss has been restored. She had already blogged about it, suggesting there gender differences involved (we know how to translate that, yes?). If there’s a lesson in all this, perhaps it is this – to be treated like a donkey you have to not be an ass.

I’m taking her out to dinner to celebrate the new kitchen floor and to show her how happy I am to be getting it.