Honey, we're home

'When was the last time you had the windows washed?"

Pause. "Isn't that what rain is for?"

"No, really, when?"

"Never. I mean, why would I do that? I can see out of them just fine."

Said windows are then washed at considerable expense. She says it's like night and day. I say it's like dawn and dusk.

Barbara, my far better half, and I are about to move in together, and these kinds of conversations come up. Not a problem. The real fear of moving in, of course, is that you'll wake up the next morning, eyeball the other in bed, and scream uncontrollably.

We'd been an item for six years, so this can hardly be called a mad dash to conjugality. At 60 and 58, measured thought trumps mad dash.

She had been living across the street for three years - a nifty interim arrangement for both. I want to smoke a cigar and watch a game: my place. She hosts a women's book group: her place. We decide to take a night off and happily hole up in our own spreads: no offense taken. More than a few veterans of 30-year marriages have found uncommon merit in the situation.

But there comes a point when you know with a moral certainty that one is better than two, and you become a real couple for all the right reasons. The kids are grown, the stars aligned. So 10 days ago, Barbara made the 25-yard trek to my place.

(Did I mention that my house was being painted at the same time? And the deck fixed? Why have a little chaos when you can wallow in the stuff?)

For the record, we never came close to fisticuffs - before, during, or after the move. A few spirited colloquies, as they say in the Senate, but that was it. Fighting is a lot of work, and, besides, it's so last year.

The Big Day was a breeze because we had been frontloading this thing for weeks. See me carry over Barbara's microwave. See me put my torn, fake leather chair on the sidewalk.

Also, movers Tom and Bobby were aces. They hauled everything on their backs because a truck would be rather silly in these circumstances. (Bobby's a cage fighter, but that's another story.)

This was a textbook move and yet we learned this: It's harder to move across the street than to Guam.

Why? Consolidation. It's brutal. There are now two mountains of junk to fit where one has been. This is a far cry from a simple transfer over the asphalt to the Elysian Fields, where space is vast.

We each had to shed tons of stuff accumulated over three decades, often at considerable emotional cost. You feel like an Eagle Scout afterward, but it takes years off your life.

This solid waste disposal requires the acceptance of Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh and the tact of a White House chief of protocol. Because: Whose what gets tossed? And its corollary: How much blood do you leave on the floor?

Clothes were easy. I still had suits with 32-inch waists I hadn't worn since late Carter. Gone. Hockey skates, squash racquets, briefcases, tired sheets, gross towels, and perfectly good shoes I've always hated. Gone. A butcher block table I bought in 1977. Sayonara. Ditto for bath mats, plates, and ties. If I haven't worn a tie in a year, it's gone. Period.

Barbara had it harder because if my mountain was, say, Mount Adams, hers was Annapurna. Also, I had almost nothing of value, while she had a lot of good stuff dating back to an earlier life in Asia.

Second - and I'll pay for this - she is a 33-degree pack rat and a solid second to Imelda Marcos in the shoe department.

You want to talk compromise? My indispensable clothes tree, which has shouldered most of my sad wardrobe since the '70s, was exiled to my closet to make room for Barbara's dresser.

Her big rosewood bookshelf, a beauty, was banished to storage because there was no room for it in the living room. So it goes.

It gets emotional fast. Barbara was in mourning as she pared her collection of cookbooks, which must rival what the Library of Congress has on the subject. She's a fabulous cook and each of these volumes meant a lot to her.

So: She's in her pantry, pulling tomes off the shelves and leafing through them as she decides what stays. A primitive survival instinct in me tells me to stay still, like an upland pointer. Don't move, don't blink, don't make a sound.

I'm standing over an empty cardboard box waiting for the losers. (I'm praying she sheds one of those Craig Claiborne hardback monsters, but no such luck.) When she finally decides to let one go, she whips her head away and, like a fallen woman out of a Victorian melodrama, thrusts the book to me as if to say, "Take it if you must!"

We're happy as clams now. Barbara has improved my place tenfold. My sense of interior decorating is apparently an acquired taste.

Our only difference - a matter of gender confirmed by every female I talk to - is that women like a busier room than men. I'm a less-is-more guy, but at the end of the day, who cares?

There are toothpaste issues - she hates mine - but we knew we had done the right thing when, amid canyons of boxes the morning after the move, we looked at each other and drove to the beach.

Sam Allis can be reached at allis@globe.com.