{"id":33888,"date":"2022-01-29T00:01:05","date_gmt":"2022-01-29T08:01:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/barbarafalconernewhall.com\/?p=33888"},"modified":"2026-06-06T10:00:27","modified_gmt":"2026-06-06T10:00:27","slug":"no-husband-to-complain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/no-husband-to-complain\/","title":{"rendered":"With No Husband to Complain, Here Are Some More Things I’m Free to Do These Days"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"wit<\/a>
I’d like to bring this oil painting out of hiding. It was painted by my great-grandmother, Emma Littlefield Bishop Loomis. Jon didn’t like it; he worried that the fox was about to kill the rabbit. I’m not worried. I think my great-grandmother might have had Isaiah 11:6 in mind when she painted it. Photo by Barbara Newhall<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Last week’s post — “Is There an Upside to Widowhood?”<\/a> — got me going on this topic. As a new widow with no husband to complain about my bad habits and quirky tastes, I see that I am now free to think and do a lot of things I had set aside for years out of consideration for Jon.<\/p>\n

For example, I can now:<\/p>\n

\u2022 Hog the San Francisco Chronicle in the morning.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Hog the flat screen TV in the evening.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Hang up the Cold War poster of the Soviet worker triumphing over the scummy capitalist bankers. Jon hated that poster. It made him uneasy.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Ditto the 150-year-old oil painting my great-grandmother did of a fox gazing at a rabbit. Jon, who donates to the SPCA and<\/em> the Best Friends Animal Society, thought the fox was about to eat the rabbit. But knowing my great-grandmother (1846-1915) as I do for the devout Baptist lady she was, I see her painting as a north woods cover of Isaiah’s “the wolf shall dwell with the lamb.”<\/p>\n

\"with<\/a>
I’d like to say good-bye to our unfriendly wedding Spode.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u2022 Make a thick vegetably soup for dinner, put it on the dinner table, eat it. Jon didn’t like soup. I do.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Slip even further out of Jon’s comfort zone by tossing chunks of tofu into the soup. Or quinoa.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Ditch our wedding china. It was one of the bride-and-groom compromises we made back in 1977, and I’ve regretted it ever since. I wanted the flowery French porcelain; Jon thought it too fussy. The Spode we settled on, with its narrow blue border, was considered a simple and elegant choice at the time. I say it’s severe, unfriendly, and not the way I want to treat my dinner guests. I’d offer it to the kids, but you can’t put it in the dishwasher.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Move the grill to the corner of the deck, out of sight. With no husband to complain, I might even give it away. What is it about first-world men that needs to cook slabs of meat under the open sky over an open flame? Grills are messy, impossible to clean (my job) and, in drought-battered California, a fire hazard. Also, they smoke up the air for the downwind neighbors.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Swear out loud — “What the f—!” — when ATT shuts down my TV, my landline and<\/em> my WIFI.\u00a0 I hated it when Jon used the F-word, so for 50 years I avoided using it myself. But I see the world differently now that Jon is not in it: there’s actually a lot of crummy stuff out there, often requiring a well timed “f—!”<\/p>\n

\u2022 Hug Jon’s night shirt and sob noisily into his pillow. It’s OK to do that because there’s nobody in the house to hear me, nobody to notice the wails, nobody to worry that maybe I’ve lost heart.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Which, of course, I have.<\/p>\n

Jon was patient with many of my quirks, including my collection of treasured old stuff.\u00a0 See\u00a0“My Old Stuff — A Little Moldy, a Little Dusty, but Unlike Certain People, It’s Still With Me.”<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0Also, “A Pillow Case of the Human Condition.”<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

\"with<\/a>
With no husband to complain, I’m free to display this Soviet era poster I purchased in Moscow in 1964. That’s a valiant Soviet worker you see there\u00a0 triumphing over those greedy capitalists. Photo by Barbara Newhall<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"with<\/a><\/p>\n

With no husband to complain about my bad habits and quirky tastes, I’m free to think and do lots of things I’d set aside for many years. <\/span>Read more.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":49364,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[2526,191,1175,29,689,214,2419],"class_list":["post-33888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-widowed","tag-grandma-loomis","tag-grief","tag-husbands","tag-jon","tag-marriage","tag-michigan","tag-widowed"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33888"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33888\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49368,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33888\/revisions\/49368"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49364"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}