Posts
Washing dishes is a private, peculiarly personal, activity. No two people do it the same way. And it seems to me that people are quite territorial about washing dishes. I'll let someone else do it in my kitchen, if I have to, but I don't want to be there to see them doing it all wrong.
For that's how everyone else does it: all wrong. One of my daughters used to let the hot water run during the entire time she was at the sink. Needless to say, she didn't learn that at home! I had to leave the room when she washed the dishes, even if it was in her kitchen, not mine.
So what makes my way the right way (aside from the very fact that I am the one doing it)? To start with, I never use a dishpan. Years ago I decided that a dishpan was an extraneous piece of equipment that just took up space. I do have a supply of rectangular plastic tubs that could conceivably be dishpans, but I use them for other, basement-type activities. I use them to dye small batches of fabric (larger batches I dye in the washing machine) or to pre-soak stained or really dirty things, like gardening gloves, before I wash them.
Not only do I not use a dishpan, but I never use the sink-stopper either. In my experience every sink stopper eventually allows your hot sudsy water to leak down the drain—and so slowly that you don't notice until only an inch of water remains.
Here's what I do. I fill the largest item to be washed—a mixing bowl or a three-liter pot—with the hottest water and a big squirt of liquid detergent. The cheaper your detergent, by the way, the larger the squirt you need to get you through the load of dishes. I think the manufacturers of the cheap stuff just buy the expensive stuff and water it down, five to one.
Anyway, into my bowl of hot suds I pile every little item in reach, placing the rest, the orphans, in the other side of the double sink. Gradually, during the process of washing and rinsing, I fill those orphans with hot water and soap from the Mother Bowl, so that they are soaking until I get to them. Such efficiency! Can anyone else be as efficient as I when it comes to doing dishes?
I drain my clean bowls and pots and pans on a hanging rack that I invented and installed over the sink.
We have a dishwasher. My husband, when he does the dishes, puts into the dishwasher every glass, plate, and piece of cutlery around, leaving him with only the larger items to wash by hand. I find this heartless. When I do the dishes, I like to hand-wash the dirty glasses and spoons I find, giving them a day at the spa, so to speak--a respite from the harsh detergent of the dishwasher. In addition, this is an opportunity for me to scrub them clean of the baked-on bits that the dishwasher leaves. An occasional hand-wash keeps them shining.
But why do I love this, you're still asking? How do I feel when I do dishes? I stand at my sink and gaze out the big window with a view of my neighbor's back porch and then, beyond, the little courtyards of the condo apartments that stretch on toward the north. But actually I'm not seeing anything at all. There's no view to see. No wildlife except the ubiquitous black squirrels, an occasional flock of bickering sparrows, and a glimpse of Nosey, our neighbor's Siamese, as he repeats his feline ritual of "I want in. No, I want out."
So I don't really see anything. But what I am aware of—what I sense—is the hot water, the clean feel of a glass or a pot when I rub my fingers over the surface. I love knowing that if I find a tiny flaw in the smoothness, I can use a scrubby pad or my fingernails or a plastic scraper to eliminate the flaw.
As I work through the pile of glasses and cutlery, pots and pans, I wipe the stove and the counters. I wash dishes until nothing is left on the counters or in the sink. The kitchen is clean. Well, the kitchen is at least tidy, because I haven't done the floor. Nor will I, today.
Someone's grandmother once reminded her that your after-dinner dishwashing is not finished until all the dishes have been washed, dried, and put away, and the floor has been not only swept but mopped. I draw the line at this. If I swept and mopped the floor every evening, there would be nothing left to feel guilty about the next day! Sufficient unto the day is the cleaning thereof. Or something like that.
Let me throw in a few words about laundry, here at the end. I long ago realized that I do the laundry frequently in order to camouflage my failure to clean the house. At the end of a very non-productive day, when the dust is still on every horizontal surface and beginning to collect on the vertical ones, I might say, "I did three loads of laundry today." In reality, of course, this simply means that I carried a few baskets full of dirty things from the top floor to the basement, then I transferred them from one machine to another, and then I carried them back upstairs. This doesn't take much effort. But it definitely sounds better to say, "I did three loads of laundry," than to say, "Today I did nothing but read."
No comments:
Post a Comment