It was 3 a.m.. The bedsheets were all tangled up, wrapped like a bandage around Maria, leaving me and my backside exposed to the cool breeze of the room air conditioner.

I whispered into her ear, thinking she was asleep. But I balked at waking her up.

I got this sudden idea of untangling the bedsheets myself, and I was surprised to realize I had never done it before. I had the idea it was a special skill,  something women share with one another. I’d always seen them snapping the sheets briskly, pulling it straight, tucking it in.

I didn’t know how to do that.

“You don’t care about the bedsheets anymore,” I whispered, realizing that Maria had stopped doing this chore and was unlikely to wake up. This message woke her up.

“What?” she said. Maria gave me that look she gives me when she is reminded that she has married a lunatic.

“You don’t straighten the bedsheets anymore,” I blurted, unimpeded by common sense or wisdom.

She gave me another funny look and then we both laughed. We had switched gender roles again.

All of my life, from childhood through my first marriage, into my second with Maria, I never once straightened the bedsheets at night. My mother did it, my first wife did it, and then Maria did it.

I never did it, I never even thought of doing it. In the way of men raised in a different world, I subconsciously thought of it as something women did. Because they always did it. No one had ever asked me to straighten a bedsheet or shown me how.

When the sheets were scrambled, I just waited for someone else – it was always a woman – to straighten them out.

Maria and I have always switched gender roles.

We both do the dishes when we find a pile in the sink. I shop and cook and pay bills, arrange for carpenters and plumbers, make sure we have enough paper towels and toilet paper, soap, shampoo, and disinfectant rubs.

In the years I have known her, Maria has never bought soap or toilet paper, or gone grocery shopping of her own accord.

And I had, until this morning, never straightened the sheets. This was something women noticed, and I never did, just as a roll of toilet paper with one sheet left is something Maria would never notice and I always do.

Sometimes we switch gender roles. I used to do the laundry, she does it now. She used to pay the bills, I do it now.

After 10 years of marriage to Maria, I have also learned this: it’s the small things that add up to the big things. My job is to always listen, learn, compromise, and change. That’s what love is about for me.

I cook most of the time, but if Maria comes in from her studio when I am lost in some piece I am writing, she’ll do the cooking. We are interchangeable that way, with most chores, and respectful of each other’s creativity. But not with bedsheets.

I often call her the “man of the house.” She is what the term used to mean.

She fixes latches, replaced broken windows and burnt out bulbs, puts up the blinds on the porch, she repairs the slate roof, stacks the firewood, tends the fires, climbs trees to save baby birds, and handles lawn mowers and tree and garden tending.

When I woke up this morning,  my legs were tangled in the blanket and bedsheets. It was one of those fierce. hot nights, and I got up, as I couldn’t sleep.

I was surprised to see that Zinnia had jumped up discreetly onto the foot of the bed and was snoozing away, further bunching up the bedsheets.

The AC was on full and I was cold.

Next to me, Maria was snug and all wrapped up and sound asleep. I got up turned the lamp on, shooed Zinnia off the bed, walked to the bottom, and untangled the blanket from the bedsheet.

Maria, who sleeps like the dead, did not budge, she just mumbled something and sighed. I had to think about how to do it without pulling Maria off of the bed or waking her up. I almost woke her up to ask her to straighten the sheets, and then I woke up and remembered who I was married to and what year it was.

Those are the habits even an old man can shed, if he has a mind to. Wow, I thought, it is so easy to be sexist, even if you have no idea you are doing it. It’s the subconscious stuff that’s so hard to get at it.

Really, I thought? Waker her up to straighten a sheet? Do I really think this is only something women can do, not me?

No, Maria was not going to sit up and hop out of bed to pull a sheet down, and I wasn’t going to ask her to. I was on my own.

How hard can this be? I didn’t act with the authority and confidence of my mother, my first wife, or Maria. I was slow, clunky, and uncertain. I don’t know how to make a crisp sheet, and I’m old.

You’ll figure it out, I told myself. And I did.

I pulled the bedsheet out gently and squared it with the bed. I pulled the blanket down and placed it carefully over the bedsheet. I even fluffed it up like I saw my mother do.

When it was all neat and even, I got back into bed. Maria stirred.

“My wife doesn’t care about the bedsheets any more,” I whispered. She looked at me funny. “I always put the sheets on the bed and wash them,” she said. “You don’t.”

“Yes,” I said, slipping on very thin ice, ‘but you don’t anymore. It’s my chore now.  We’ve gender shifted again. We’ve exchanged chores.”

“You don’t care about the tangled bedsheets anymore,” I mumbled courteously. “You haven’t been untangling them lately.”

“And you never change them or put them in the wash.”

There was silence. “Well,”  I said. “It’s early, let’s get some sleep.” I pulled the sheets over both of our bodies, and Maria sighed in comfort and thanked me for straightening them.

Zinnia hopped back up on the bed and started licking my feet, now exposed once more. The sheet was already re-tangled. I sat up, leaned over, and cradled her sweet head in my arms.

At least my chest and  shoulders were covered.

“You see, young lady,” I said, “you can teach an old dog new tricks.