When we bought our house, The Departed and I both worked, and had commutes, and agreed that household chores should be divided. What this meant, in practice, was that I cooked and he cleaned up the kitchen afterward – except that afterward didn’t seem to mean immediately afterward, but rather, sometime before the next meal, and often then only if I asked and explicitly said I needed it to be done so that I could prepare the meal in question. Many times, I didn’t bother to ask, but simply cleaned up myself, which would sometimes prompt him to rush into the kitchen and start doing cleaning it himself, saying I didn’t know how to load the dishwasher correctly – an odd statement for someone who refused to believe that some items should only be loaded in the top rack, and that porcelain plates will chip when jammed in next to metal pans. He would do the cleanup, but making dinner – and hungry children – would have to wait an hour while he did so.

You will not be surprised to learn that we ate out a lot.

We had a cleaning service, and they did a decent enough job, but there are some things that services don’t do, and these became a subject of contention in the household: Laundry, in particular. When I met The Departed, his wardrobe consisted mainly of Costco jeans, mid-brand sweaters he’d received as gifts, and shirts of the corporate freebie variety, and I set about helping him choose more flattering – and where I could, slightly more upscale – clothing. He refused to throw out any of the older things, so there was always plenty in his closet. But he only wore the more recent additions to his wardrobe, so he didn’t have a lot to choose from in a given week, and the amount dwindled as things wore out quickly through constant use.

Laundry couldn’t get done fast enough for him, though The Child and I seemed to manage just fine. His things would sit in the dryer too long, leaving them wrinkled, which made him mad, and after my suggestions for resolving this issue himself went ignored (“you can unload the dryer when you hear the beep” and “there’s a touch-up cycle on the dryer that will solve this”), he started doing his own laundry. That presented its own set of issues: Sometimes, the laundry basket was in use when he needed to do laundry. Other times, it was the washer, or the dryer. His laundry was always done with a lot of thumping and sighing – usually when I was watching  TV – but after a while, I learned how to tune that out, too.

Until the night he could find no other time to put his laundry away than midnight, startling me out of a sound sleep with the thumping of hangers against the bedroom wall. I had no idea hangers even made noise until that moment; I fully expected Joan Crawford to emerge from the closet when I shouted, angrily, at him.

I knew what he was doing, but I also knew he had just won the battle, so I asked around and hired the first recommendation I got: The Cleaning Lady, a Bosnian refugee with several missing teeth and a car whose bumper was held together with duct tape. Her rate seemed high to me, but then, all I had to compare it to was my Manhattan cleaner, which was a long time ago. I was very happy the first few times she cleaned, and pleased especially that – like my Manhattan cleaner – she seemed to notice things that needed to be done, so I didn’t need to point things out her. The Departed’s laundry got done, and he had nothing to complain about, so it was money well spent.

I hired my first cleaning lady when I was in my 20’s and lived in Manhattan. The first time I met her, she came to my apartment to give me a price quote.

She looked around, raised an eyebrow oh-so-slightly, and said, You cleaned before I came.

I fumbled a bit.

She smiled. It’s okay – everyone does.

She quoted a reasonable price,  came with the best possible references, and I liked her, so I hired her. I gave her a key, and we agreed on the day I would leave her payment on the table in the morning, and come home to a clean apartment in the evening. I told her, help yourself to anything in the fridge; being a single person in Manhattan, this was not as generous an offer as it might be from someone else. The typical contents of my fridge:  milk, cereal, and light beer. From time to time there might also be leftover Chinese food, or vodka in my freezer.

That first day, I came home to a delightful luxury: A completely clean apartment with no effort on my part, except opening my wallet. I thought that there was one less beer in the fridge – at least, I was pretty sure it had been a full six-pack when I left that morning. But I didn’t really care. I had an apartment with a view of the Chrysler building, and it was clean enough to invite guests. I had arrived.

She came back two weeks later, and on that day, my apartment was returned to a magical clean state, and I had one less can of beer in the fridge. This time, I was sure she had drunk it.

By now, though, she had seen what my apartment looked like when I didn’t clean it first, and she didn’t try to raise her very reasonable rate. In case you, or some economic researcher of the future, want to know, the rate to clean a one-bedroom Manhattan apartment with two cats in 1995, it was $50 and one can of beer.

This seemed like a good deal. I was not a beer drinker, then or now, but I made the effort to keep my fridge stocked with beer. I discovered she only liked canned varieties, and no microbrews, and made sure there was always one can there for her, nicely chilled.

I liked her a lot, and once I left New York, could not find another like her, so instead I used cleaning services, when I could afford them. I kept hoping to find a regular person, and eventually, when The Departed started complaining too much about the burden of doing his own laundry, I asked around and received a recommendation – friend of friend, the Cleaning Lady.

Although I was born and raised in the United States, I did not learn how to drive until I was 30.

This was possible because I grew up in Manhattan, where cars are not only a significant expense, they are a hindrance. I mastered other skills instead: My taxi-hailing is unparalleled. I learned that certain subway lines could be ridden at 3am, even in a semi-sober state, because the cars were full of other passengers, most of them Polish cleaning ladies.

Of course, there are places that the subway doesn’t go, or the cost of a taxi ride is prohibitively high, but here’s the thing: if you’re a young woman, you can usually find a date with a car who will drive you pretty much anywhere else. You’ll want to be careful with that one, of course, and sometimes you might want to bring a friend. If you should ever do this, here is what you will talk about on the drive: How it is possible for a well educated American adult to get through life with no driver’s license.

I finally learned to drive only because I had to, when at the age of 30, I left the city and moved to the suburbs. I enjoy driving, at times – I drive little, sporty cars, so country roads are fun. Mostly, I find it stressful in a way that riding in a cab just isn’t, usually. True, there was that one time I got into a stolen cab and spent the ride clutching pepper spray and hoping there wouldn’t be a lot of rats wherever he dumped my body. But, I only made that mistake once, and driving, now that I live in the suburbs, I have to do every day.

Last weekend, I hosted a dinner downtown for area alumni of my high school. There are a surprising number of us in Seattle, mostly of whom are men because the school didn’t admit girls for the first sixty years of its existence. One of the guys, who lives near me, offers me a ride, which I decline because, as the organizer, I have to get there early, but also, I know a lot about his failing marriage, don’t have a girl friend to invite along, and am not sure what we’ll discuss now that I have a driver’s license.

We’re a rowdy table, and when I stand up to address the group, I notice two things: first, the table next to ours appears a bit perturbed by all the noise, so I apologize for our New York manners; second, it’s snowing. The last time it snowed here was right before Christmas. We got a half inch and all the schools closed – Snowpocalypse, Seattle style.

We glance at the snow, but we’re having fun, and its not late by any definition, so we linger until we’re all really, truly done, and have the next event planned, too.

I head out, and realize there’s not much in the way of visibility – the big fluffy flakes are pretty, but also pretty hard to see through. I drive slowly, keeping to the right and hoping I’m actually in a lane because the markings aren’t visible. Everyone is driving slowly, though: Seattle is a city of little old ladies when ever there’s weather involved.

I get off the freeway at my usual exit, head up the hill to my house, and start to get annoyed at the driver ahead of me, who is driving slower than everyone else I’ve encountered en route, which doesn’t actually seem possible. I think, how annoying – I’ll pass him when I get closer.

It doesn’t take me long to realize that I’m not getting any closer. Also, the traction control light on my dash is flashing. I’m not sure exactly what that light is supposed to tell me, but at just that moment it’s serving as a helpful reminder that this car, unlike the other two cars I’ve owned during my brief tenure as a licensed driver, doesn’t have all wheel drive.

I’m not even a quarter of the way up the hill, but my car is, at best, inching along in the snow, no matter how I try to apply the gas. It’s just not getting anywhere. The car ahead of me pulls to the right, and sure enough, I am going to pass him after all, in a sense – he’s backing slowly down the hill.

That’s when I remember that if I’d taken the exit just before my usual one, I could have driven home on route that is blissfully hill-free.

I decide to turn around: If I can get the car down the hill, I can go home another way. The car turns, and I’m in the correct lane, and I begin to slide slowly down the hill.

The brakes don’t work. I try to steer, but the effect of this effort is simply to change the angle of the car as it descends. I’m skidding downhill but also slightly to the right, heading straight for a fire hydrant. My phone starts ringing and ringing, and I can see it’s The Child, who’s probably worried, and if could pull the car over and stop it and safely talk to her, I would, but at just this moment I can’t do any of these things. I’m trying to remember if I learned anything in Drivers’ Ed that might be useful in this situation, but all I can come up with is how to execute a K turn, and that if I hit the curb while parking it’s an automatic driver’s test failure.

But hitting the curb is probably better than hitting a fire hydrant, so I nudge the wheel again and the car cooperates by skidding even more to the right, coming to a stop against the curb, just before the entrance to a condo complex. Three women stand there in the snow, smoking and watching the evening’s entertainment. I turn on my flashers, and get out, and try to breathe and figure out what to do next. The other car has finished backing down the other side of the street, and the driver locks it and starts trudging up the hill.

I grew up in a city; I know how walking works. I can do this.

One of the smokers suggests I park in the condos’ guest spot, and though I’m a bit wary of restarting my car  now that it’s stopped, it does seem like a bit of a target in its current location, so I get back in and let it drift just a bit further down and to the right, and somehow skid it into the spot.

The smokers applaud. I take a bow.

The child calls again, anxious and worried. I tell her the car is stuck, and I’m walking home, and she wants to help. She’s coming to get me, she says, and she’ll bring the Red Dog. I suggest that what would really help me is to be warm, and calm, so while I walk up the hill, in the snow, in boots that weren’t made for either, The Child makes a cup of tea and sets it out on the counter to await my arrival.