LETTERS FROM HOME: ALL THE COMFORTS OF SHARING A HOME SWEET HOME

April 18, 1996

Dear Patty,

Know what the hard part about being married is? It's not having philosophical differences over the nature of God or even deciding whose family to spend holidays with. The hard part is deciding which piece of furniture goes where and what color to paint a wall.

Standard thinking is that men don't care about such details but we do. Or I do. Has nothing to do with the ancient Chinese art of feng shui, as far as I know. Everything to do with feeling comfortable.

One of DC's many contributions to our marital conjugation is a rigidly constructed couch from the Marquis de Sade collection. Give me a couch you sit on, not defend yourself from.

This number is made of silk or something, so she throws a sheet over it to keep slobs like me (and Hank and Lucy) from ruining the effect. So this is a couch neither of us wants me to sit on.

Then there's my couch, a big old foamy affair with a round back. Put your head on one end and your body drops from sight.

So which couch is in the living room, smack in front of the TV and stereo, next to the reading lamp? Seems the red in my couch clashes with the purple stained-glass windows on the other side of the room. Whereas the white sheet on her couch goes fine with purple.

I have not surrendered in this battle of wills. Only catching my breath on the red couch. Making yourself at home is an art.

Then there's the matter of yellow. One day when DC was very busy (as usual) and I (as usual) wasn't, she sent me to the paint store with the mission of finding a color for our bedroom, little suspecting I'd return with yellow. Yellow is for kitchens, she said. Yellow, I said.

She called her mother, and a sister on the other side of the state to report that I wanted a yellow bedroom.

I don't see the problem. Yellow is a comfort color for me. The only problem is, the yellow on those little cards at the paint store is a lot less yellow than the paint. The first version we tried, which had the gentle word saffron in the title, was only cooler than the sun by a few degrees.

DC was willing to try again with a lesser yellow only because Monet had a yellow dining room. Alas, this yellow still provoked perspiration. At last we found a color that hardly looked like yellow on the card. More like jaundiced white, but it looks good on the wall. Even DC said so once she finished telling her mother and sister about having to paint the room three times.

This week is turning into one of our major marital anniversaries. It's the week the city takes spring cleaning to its absurd limit and collects the latest dregs of its citizens' lives. Pickup trucks prowl the cul-de-sacs early in the morning and into the night in search of soiled booty.

DC is a shameless member of this club. Last year she harvested some broken chairs and a cracked marble sink. DC swears the broken chairs stacked on our back porch are not those same broken chairs. And she insists the sink will fit perfectly into our bathroom when we remodel. Think millennium.

The sink has become a permanent fixture in our backyard, so much so that you might not even notice it was missing. Especially during spring clean-up week.

It's hopeless, though. Along with the topless picnic table, the rotting railroad ties and the sandstone rocks scavenged from some ruin, the sink has become part of our own little outdoor sculpture garden. Our garden grows every year along about this time.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a member of the Southeast Missourian news staff.