The longer one gets married, the more likely one will engage in ritual, annual, unwinnable arguments. Maria and I have very few fights, one of them comes every June when Ed Bullock, our rugged lumberjack, shows up in his giant truck to dump a mount of firewood right behind the woodshed.

The annual standoff begins the minute Ed pulls out of the driveway, and I pay him and turn to Maria and say, “How about we get someone here to help you stack the wood.” I can see her eyes flash and almost feel her heels digging in.

“No,” she said, “I enjoy doing it, and I’m working on different ways to stack the wood so I don’t need corners.”

I know that look. She has made up her mind.

Some background. I won the first year we had this argument right at the start of our marriage.

She was sometimes timid then, just getting started with her new life as an artist and mistrustful of men. She had felt exploited in her previous marriage, doing the heavy lifting for years on houses they were restoring and pushing her art aside.

She was pleased I didn’t want her to do all the hard chores while I sat on my butt writing.  (I’m big on hiring people to do hard labor.)

And she was even happier to be able to say no to tasks that help her with her art.

(Ed Bullock is our giant, rugged, hard-working, and honest lumberjack. He delivers the wood we need for the wood stoves over the summer. He charges $225 a chord, a fair price here. His work is brutish, involves hea y machinery that breaks, working in heat and rain, and hauling and cutting wood continuously. He deserves every penny he gets. He has no clue of the battle he has set in motion for her when he leaves.)

Maria has changed, and I love and respect her for it. The new Maria is tough as nails.

The woman I married was insecure and anxious; she expected very little of men and sometimes felt she had to submit to their decisions, manipulations, and bullying. That person no longer exists. Maria is strong, focused, and committed to her life and agency.

No man is ever going to push her around again. Surely not me.

She and I have a very equal, honest, and occasionally volatile relationship. We’ve had a few multi-round shouting matches. They were pretty loud.

Maybe three since we were married.

The timidity is gone. She has a truly iron will. It was always there; it just didn’t know to come out.

I used to be a big shot and negotiated with influential, complicated, and testy people when I worked in television and newspapers.

I was considered very good at negotiating and was much feared. I love a fight, strategizing, and arguing; negotiating is an art and a skill.

Maria is not impressed by that.

She is lovely 90 percent of the time but is also one-half Sicilian and one-half Gerrman. She can ignite like wildfire, although that doesn’t last long.

She can sometimes trigger my “mother” response; I don’t respond well to being yelled at, as I was yelled at constantly,  and I tend to yell back. Our flare-ups are rare, one every few years or so, and they never last long.

They scare the hell out of both of us.

We spent a lot of time together, which we both cherish. There is very little we disagree on.

When mad, we stop, cool off, and return to the argument later. We always work it out. I find these disagreements healthy, clearing the air and reaffirming our great love for one another. I think of it crudely: sometimes, you must flush the toilet.

I recently won a significant victory by getting her permission to hire Ethan up the road to collect the firewood cut and left all over the farm from the fallen libs of two trees this winter.

Maria was swamped with studio art work.  She is busy all the time now.

She woke up one morning saying she would have to get to the firewood that needed to be collected. I sprang into action, and she yielded without much of a fight.

This was a rare win for me on the wood stacking front.

The regular firewood deliveries are different. She is dug in.

But back to that firewood stacking.

I’m not the boss here; we don’t have a boss. I don’t aspire to be the boss. She wouldn’t let me be the boss.

We work hard at respecting one another. Our relationship is balanced and equal. We do a lot of gender mixing. I like to food shop; she doesn’t. We take turns like to cook – she does almost all of it when I’m just out of the hospital.

I think Maria sometimes takes up too much work, straining muscles, and sometimes just exhausting herself.  She pushes herself and struggles to take time to relax.

She loves to work hard; she rarely passes it up. Today she went out to the back pasture to fix a metal gate damaged by an electric company truck. As usual, I offered to call someone, and she said no.

She has a special way of stacking the wood and is eager to experiment with it.

I understand that I am lucky beyond reason to have someone like this as my partner, especially on a farm,  but I also feel protective of her since “no” is not a word in her vocabulary I often hear.

I feel I have to be an advocate for her without her feeling pushed or bullied. She would not put up with that, and I wouldn’t do that, even if I could.

These decisions are up to her, and she has become as tough a negotiator as anyone I tangled with at CBS News.

I love this evolving Maria very much. I don’t have much use for people who don’t fight for themselves.  She is strong, gifted, and competent, and our partnership is beautiful beyond my experience or imagination.

My idea for stacking wood this year is that she asks some of the Amish young women she has worked with before to come and help her, or I can call Ethan,  the young muscle up the road, to go and do at least one of the cords.

It’s up to her.

As of now, she’s standing firm. That’s a lot of firewood out there; she loves moving and stacking it. I’ve mentioned it two or three times and already got my first snarl. I am backing off – for now.

I imagine I’m a little more s sensitive on the issue since I can’t help her any longer. I used to throw the wood for her and help stack it. I can now fuss like my grandma over her hard work.  Soon, I’ll hear the early evening thump of wood thrown toward the shed.

After this, there will be at least four more cords. I’m not sure if this is four arguments or one continuing argument.

This is the 13th firewood stacking battle in our fourteen years; I won the first one when she was a little afraid of defying me. That dynamic didn’t last long.

I am very grateful she does not fear me in any way; ours is an equal relationship of trust and caring. I love the way she tackles the chores here. Sometimes, she does scare me with her ferocity and daring I haven’t won a firewood fight in many years.

Maria is clear on this issue for now.  It’s her choice; she likes doing it. I respect that.

These head buttings are exciting,  I’ll admit. They seem to make our relationship stronger. It’s good to know we can fight once in a while and get past it.

I’m not ready to quit yet.

I smell a possible partial victory here as she has muscle pain in her left wrist. She has muttered about doing the first cord and getting help with the second. That is a first.

As a proud negotiator, I see this possible yielding as an acceptable compromise, the kind of back-and-forth our politicians used to do but don’t do any longer. If she insists on doing it, I’ll shut up and thank her.

Pushing and prodding Maria is pointless.

It’s like throwing pebbles at a wall. I have to wait for the very right moment –  like when it’s 109 degrees, and there are huge stacks of wood to stack in the humidity and heat. Then if I bring it up again, I might get lucky.

And I’ll rush to the phone and call Ian, or she will ride with me to the Amish and get some help.

The 13th or 14th annual Firewood Conflict is now officially underway. I’m learning to live with losing.

I’ll keep you posted.