Saved from squalor and sloth

Here's a quote from an Alice Munro story called Meneseteung. It sums up rather nicely the enchanted effect my wife has had on my existence in the world of things:

A man may keep his house decent, but he will never—if he is a proper man—do much to decorate it. Marriage forces him to live with more ornament as well as sentiment, and it protects him, also, from the extremities of his own nature—from a frigid parsimony or a luxuriant sloth, from squalor, and from excessive sleeping or reading, drinking, smoking, or freethinking.

To set the record straight, I do not smoke, nor do I excessively sleep (would that I could). I am not consciously parsimonious. I drink hardly at all, read voraciously, and am most definitely susceptible to protracted bouts of freethinking. I find much to like, too, in the concept of luxuriant sloth.

Left to my own devices, as Ms. Munro notes, I will keep a place decent, but won't do much to decorate it. The dishes will get washed, the bed made, the toilet scrubbed, the socks picked up from the floor. But the walls and various horizontal surfaces will remain, for the most part, unadorned.

So, yes, for the 34 years I've been married to Susan I have indeed lived amidst "more ornament as well as sentiment" than would otherwise have been the case. But Susan in no wise has forced these conditions upon me. She has just gone about doing what she does, which is to say casually and instinctively shaping our surroundings into an ever more lovely home.

Everywhere I look I see and relish her graceful hand, feeling privileged to dwell in a world of her creation.

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