We have a rule at my house: "She who cooks, does not clean". Since I’m the only one who cooks around here, "she" is me! And, since my daughter is in the midst of that twilight zone that is teenagedom, she is indefinitely removed from the equation. (We’re just thankful that she resurfaces for meals once in a while!) Unfortunately for him, this means that my husband gets stuck with the dinner dishes most nights. He is a pretty good sport about it, though. (He takes out the garbage and irons his own shirts too!) I think he realizes that if I had to cook AND do all the dishes, the meals around here would be pretty sparse. In fact, you’d probably find a lot more empty take-out containers in our trash bins.

The only rub to this arrangement is that he only seems to manage to fit three things at a time in our dishwasher, which means that I have to constantly get in there and reorganize. He also splashes water everywhere and never wipes down the counters or dries up the floor afterward. (Hmmm. Maybe I don’t have such a good thing going after all!)

One evening not too long ago, I was crossing through the kitchen on my way to somewhere, when…..

This article appears in Sep 30 – Oct 7, 2009.