Chapter One

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I have always enjoyed keeping house. From my earliest childhood I wanted to cook, so my mother taught me how. The first thing I learned to make was oatmeal. The second was macaroni and cheese, with a sauce that sometimes involved a can of condensed cream of mushroom soup (I liked it that way) and sometimes didn't (the rest of the family preferred it without).

I don't remember wanting to learn to do the laundry, but my mother taught me (and my brothers and sister) to do that, too: sorting, washing, drying, folding, ironing. One of my brothers got so good at folding that when he was in college, little old ladies would gather around him at the laundromat for the pleasure of watching him fold his shirts.

My mother wasn't much on cleaning, so I mostly figured that out on my own. Perhaps this relatively late start on the cleaning front is why I have never attained (or, truth be told, aspired to) any particularly high standard of cleanliness. But by the time I was in my late twenties, I had spent years rather happily keeping house for myself and for other people, aware that this was not very fashionable but not really caring, because I liked it and on some level sensed the value of it, even if I didn't think about it very deeply.

My adventures in housework became more intense, however, during the years of my first marriage. I married my first husband at the end of my first year in graduate school and buried him four years later, at the beginning of my sixth year. Over the intervening yea