On Monday, we will bid farewell to our contractor, who has been a force of nature, and a force of change in our lives. Drifting off to sleep, recently, my husband said, "What will we talk about when the contractor leaves?" And it's a question I had pondered, too. A note about non-fiction. No one wants to read an un-funny litany of complaints. The impact of that sort of piece is to make the reader side with the alleged villain. (When a neighbor of Sylvia Plath's wrote a long rant about Plath, critics said, "Plath sounds fine. It's the writer who sounds like a turd.") My contractor--let's call him E--has certain charming moments of insanity. He actually has a crazed look in his eye, at all times. When he needed access to an obscure window in our house, he slapped a thin, rickety plank to the exterior wall, high in the air, then hovered uneasily on that plank. Weeks later, we asked E to move the ladder that was sitting uselessly under the plank, and E ...