LETTERS FROM HOME: WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH THE NICKELS AND DIEMES OF YOUR LIFE?

April 29, 1999

Dear Leslie,

The vacuum cleaner and strains of "Evita" whined in the background when DC answered my phone call home at 8 on a Saturday morning. "I'm very busy," she said.

That's because I was at a hotel 500 miles away, a circumstance she viewed as an opportunity to clean the house without the husbandly presence she insists is the biggest obstacle to our house appearing in Southern Living. Absence makes the vacuum cleaner run.

A vision materialized through the telephone line of me returning to a house like my mother-in-law's, spotless, orderly even when Hank and Lucy are allowed to venture inside. Is it possible?

In a call from the road the next night, DC sounded less confident. She had taken the house apart, she said, but it wasn't going back together.

This is the first house I've ever owned. The longer we live here the more convinced I am that a house comes to symbolize your life. Right now, our lives are a clutter.

Sometimes the urge to move to a house with less upkeep is powerful. But DC is in love with this little bungalow, the stained glass windows, the wainscotting, the broken garbage disposal, the inoperable doorbell, the water-stained ceiling...

When I returned home late the next day, DC was mopping the kitchen. The room sparkled. I hugged, congratulated and thanked her. But walking around the remade room I began to notice certain familiar irregularities. Her copy of Tom Clancy's "Debt of Honor" was still on the telephone table, where its blue and red and gold cover has become a household landmark over the past year. Moving to the dining room, the table still was our repository for bills and tax forms. In the living room, the coffee table still had no space for a coffee cup.

DC had mopped and swept heroically. I am the guilty party here, the slob who notices DC's stray book but not the golf balls under the corner of the couch or my shoes bookending the coffee table. But what I discovered once I climbed to the top of the stairs made me pause to wonder, as I occasionally have over the past 5 1/2 years of marriage, where her station is on my radio dial.

I am in the habit of dropping my change into a big bowl that sits on my bookcase. Admittedly, the bowl occasionally overflows. The overflow was gone. On the floor below the bookcase, DC had separated the contents of the bowl into piles of pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters.

"What Are You Doing for the Rest of Your Life?" went one of the songs my mom used to sing around the house when I was a boy. "All the nickels and the dimes of your life."

A closer examination of my bookcase revealed another product of DC's busy weekend. She had organized the shelves: metaphysical books on one level, golf books on another. Two books that didn't fit, Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" and Aldous Huxley's "Island," had a new home on the floor next to the coin piles.

DC revealed that during my absence she also had intended to switch our bed from the winter to the summer bedroom, to paint the bedrooms and hallway, to sand and varnish the back stairs, to build bookcases for the library and to paint the walls of her tornado/laundry room in the basement "to make it more homey."

Love, Sam