Like many aging Boomers we have downsized.  It began with the house.  Years ago we sold our rural home and moved into town into a modest abode, so small that my husband likes to stand in the intersection between the living room and kitchen and point out that from there you can see every room in the house.

We are now getting to know it even more intimately because the downsizing includes no more house-cleaner.

This is a relative sacrifice, I know. It is not in everyone’s allowance to pay an expert to come in and clean up your mess. But in the years when we both worked outside of the home, it was easy to rationalize.  Our house-cleaner became our pal. I wouldn’t say member of the family because no one in our family has ever dug in so efficiently and cheerfully.

It was hard to say goodbye. The dog loved her.  But  paying for someone to clean was part of our two income full-time working couple budget.  Now we are part time at-home workers.  Semi-retired. That means we are on a relatively fixed income. That means reality check.

So, now we are the couple who clean together.  My husband and I never got into serious chore wars in our house, probably because neither of us has a rigid standard of sanitary correctness. And I’m nearsighted so all I have to do is take off my glasses and I don’t really notice spider webs in the candelabra.

Our housework arrangement was simple. Both of us did as little as possible. And then there was Tanja, our miracle worker, coming every two weeks to shovel us out.

Now it’s up to us. We blast music – Taj Mahal gets us both moving – and team up after dust bunnies. I’m thinking we should we could get some chic rubber gloves. Leopard  ones for me. His in a Harley print.

Sharing housework has long been a scratchy point for couples. Berkeley professor Arlie Hochschild wrote about the inequity in housework duties in her 1989  book The Second Shift, revving up a revolution among working women who turned to their spouses and said , “You’re on, Bud.”

I urged my husband to take the floors. I could have argued that mops are manly. But I explained that years ago when I was suffering from carpal tunnel stress, a physical therapist said pushing a vacuum cleaner was murder on the wrist. I took that as a lifelong prohibition.

Since he went for that, I added in windows, seeing that he’s better at ladders. I generously volunteered to do the bathroom and the kitchen.  We are having to figure out products. I tend to go with the all-green save the earth cleaning products but he wonders about that blue stuff his mother used to dump in the toilet and which I say has got to be on the toxic list by now.

Retiring couples are warned that adjustments will be necessary in order to mutually enjoy the new bonus hours of togetherness. Friends who moved to Mexico to retire found their casita too small for the two of them and to save the marriage rented a second house. They live next door to each other and have sleep-overs.

That seems extreme, but a little separation is good which is why we each have retained our individual home offices. They’re in two rooms in a small building in the backyard. Each is in charge of cleaning his and her own. Mine’s a mess.

For the first time in a long time the newspaper didn’t arrive that morning. Was not waiting at the foot of the stairs. Never got spread across the kitchen table. So it seemed a cosmic fluke or unhappy coincidence that by noon that day the word was out that our newspaper had been sold.

The Press Democrat, owned for 26 years by the New York Times, had gone to an obscure media group named Halifax. My first thought was why would a bunch of Nova Scotians want a paper in Sonoma County? When Halifax was identified as a Florida group I thought uh-oh.  Florida — conservative, anti-union. Not good.

But the sad part was that our newspaper – I say “our” because I worked there before and after the Times took ownership – had grown into an important paper under the banner of the Times, the mother of all newspapers. And now mother had left us on some Halifax doorstep and disappeared.

What would happen now? Would the new owners bust the union? Turn the paper into a Tea Party bulletin, a rah-rah chamber of commerce pro-business sheet?  Or let it be what it is?

I worried about the people inside, former colleagues and friends, family really. Some with young kids. Some a few years away from retiring. Married couples dependent on one employer. Had this been happening when my husband and I still worked there and had kids at home I would have been in the ladies room throwing up.

Back in 1985 there were also rumors that the family-owned paper was going to sell. When we heard the New York Times was the new boss we hit the bar across the street and started celebrating. If you were going to be taken over by a newspaper chain this was the best.

You have to understand this was a big deal to newspaper people in Santa Rosa California. It allowed the hometown paper to think bigger, shed its provincial image and take on a more sophisticated world view. There was more investigative journalism of local issues. Reporters and photographers went out of town to explore national and global subjects.  I had a great time. The new publisher invited me to write a twice weekly column and said I could write about whatever I wanted.  The Times news service put my column on their wire and I was getting letters from readers in Chicago and Seattle.

Our business cards came with the prestigious NYT logo. We were not the New York Times of 43^rd Street, more like a second cousin to the Gray Lady, but we were a New York Times paper. That meant status not only for journalists but the community as well to have the local paper connected to the Times.

Not that it wasn’t mutually satisfying. The Press Democrat was a good investment.  Sonoma County wasn’t just a nice place for Times execs to come visit and sample the wine, the paper made them proud (winning the Pulitzer among other awards) and we made them lots of money.

And when tough times hit the newspaper business and advertising revenue started to decline the Press Democrat made sacrifices, freezing salaries, squeezing staff, nudging retirees.

And now, in a move to presumably save the mother ship, the Times decided to cut off the distant cousins.  Business-wise that probably makes sense and wasn’t a shock but the cold and quick way it came down was. News of the sale was leaked to an online media blogger which hurried the official announcement. Employees were told by New York via email that Halifax would be deciding their futures. The staff, the paper, its readers and the community were unceremoniously dumped.

The New York Times was a good company to work for. It’s still a great paper to read. Same for the Press Democrat. Both almost always hit our front steps every morning. But I still feel jilted.

When I flew from Boston to San Francisco I was the only one reading a newspaper in my row. At least I could wrestle it into fold-able parts without competing for elbow room, but I was disappointed because I had seen many people buying papers in the terminal. And it was an early morning flight, the traditional newspaper reading and coffee drinking hour.

I’m always on the look-out for other newspaper readers. Those who still get their news from print. Hard core types. Purists, we might call ourselves, those who consume news the way God and Gutenberg intended.

A lot of people are prematurely nostalgic for newspapers.  “I used to read newspapers all the time,” people of my generation will say, with the sentimental reverence you might attach to an old Chevy or a Mounds bar.

But then I’ll run into someone much younger who is, as we say, on the same page.   Writer Anne Zimmerman, in her 30s and of that generation that generally leans online, said she actually prefers print.    Zimmerman, author of a delicious new biography of M.F.K. Fisher’s early years, An Extravagant Hunger, compared reading on the web to reading a newspaper in print.

“When I’m reading on the web I skim. My attention jumps around and it’s more of a fact-finding mission than a real enjoyable learning experience.”

Actually, it turns out that print people may have an advantage.  New research by the University of Oregon concluded that people who read in print remember news stories better and in greater detail than those who gulp their news online.

My whole writing career has been in print so I have a personal and professional loyalty to words in black and white that you can hold in your hands. My best argument for reading an actual newspaper is the unintended information you get from a random sighting. You’re reading about the latest political bloodbath or checking to see if the Giants are out of their slump and your eyes slide over to a story you never knew you needed or wanted to know about. And there it is – a little gift.

I had a pile of papers waiting for me after vacation, including two dailies, the Sunday edition of a third paper and two weeklies which could not go into the recycle bin until I went through them. Otherwise I would have missed a new report on migraines, a review of a new BBC series and a story quoting poet Mary Oliver on the need for solitude. I surely would have missed the story about my local librarian opening a Brazilian wax business.