Cohabitation carries various tiers of responsibility, and paramount among these is respecting the others’ space. When these spaces are shared, the best way to respect them is to keep them clean: hence chores. Ever since living together in Iowa, Sam and I have had weekly chores which we assigned ourselves and made sure we followed though on every weekend. For Sam, it was laundry and vacuuming. For me it was mopping the floors, dusting the house, taking out the garbage, taking out the recycling, cleaning the toilets, shoveling when necessary, mowing the lawn, fertilizing the lawn, and shingling the roof as needed. It was relatively balanced.
Most of these chores remained assigned to their original owner when we moved to Ithaca, however over the past year we’ve been more relaxed on the weekly follow through. Deciding to get back to order, we committed ourselves to weekly cleanings again…but Sam had grown tired of vacuuming the house. Actually, she’s been complaining about doing it for years. So I decided to try something new last week: putting the chores on pieces of paper layed in a salad washer, mixing the hopper, and each drawing out four chores that we’d be responsible to complete over the next couple of days. I drew clean bathrooms, clean kitchen, clean living room, and…vacuum. Sam drew laundry.
She’s strongly advocating for this new system from here on out – drawing who does what chore. I pretended not to hear her over the vacuum noise I’d just discovered.





















