The cleaning ladies are here this morning. Three cheerful, careful women come every other Friday to clean our house. They know Sheila likes butterflies, so one day they brought us a dead, but otherwise perfect, yellow swallowtail butterfly that that they found on the sidewalk. They give us tamales at Christmas. They do the windows and floors, and laugh at our comical dogs. I give them two hours of my salary for their six woman-hours of work, plus a holiday bonus that grows every year. I think it’s a great deal and I believe they are okay with it, too.

On Mondays, the Poop Lady comes with her scoop and bucket to clean up our back yard. A month’s worth of her visits is roughly the equivalent of 90 minutes of my salary.

I get my shirts laundered — that’s about six minutes of salary each.

All those services plus painting the bedroom, replacing the furnace filter, waxing my eyebrows, polishing my toenails — all things I could do myself but don’t have to, because of the increasingly uncommon blessing of money to spare.