The Domestic Files: Washing Dishes

Some people refer to the task of washing dishes as “pearl diving.”  That is, to say the least, a little romanticized.  Sometimes—with all the knives and broken glassware in the sink—washing dishes by hand is closer to stuffing your fingers inside the jaws of a shark.

As a kid, I watched enough people retrieve bloody fingers from dishwater to know that washing dishes was not for me.  My sisters thought that I didn’t like to wash dishes because I was afraid I might accidentally clean myself in the process.  There is some truth in that.  There is also something to the fact that washing dishes severely cut into my time for getting covered by dirt in the first place.

Oddly, as an adult, I have learned to accept and sometimes enjoy washing dishes.  Washing dishes provides just enough structure and motion to clear my mind of most extraneous inputs.  I think better.  I solve problems at the sink.  I was at the sink washing dishes, for instance, when I realized that I kept crashing my face into the bedroom door when I got up late at night because I closed the door when I went to bed.

The door is open now.

I am a vigorous dishwasher.  My friend Kenny would say that I “go about it like a man killing snakes.”   I sometimes fling soap suds from one end of the counter to the other.  I will also admit to breaking glassware and bending the occasional tine on a fork.  I also enjoy making “creative” drying stacks, where bowls balance precariously on cups and silverware props up plates.  Though not always stable, my inventive drying stacks are personally satisfying.

My final observation is this: washing the dishes and drying clothes are the very two tasks that provide absolute balance in the universe as we presently know it.  They are the perfect opposites to establish equilibrium.  Where clothing (socks in particular) tend to vanish in the dryer; dishes greatly multiply in number while hidden under the heap of soap suds in the sink.              

--Mitchell Hegman