The dishwasher broke. It just stopped working, and left a lake on the floor. For a week, the hulking, useless machine has been squatting in the center of my galley-ish kitchen, waiting for the soaked wood in its spot to dry. I’ve been navigating the beast and washing dishes WITH MY HANDS. Like a pioneer woman. Pruned fingers and wet shirts, acutely aware of each and every dish. Lots of complaining.
I remember now. I remember the A frame in the woods, all those years ago. Three little boys, a very pregnant summer. Husband working long days, no laundry, no dishwasher. The pictures look idyllic, the small hippie rental house with its lofts and angles, surrounded everywhere by deep woods. Very very close woods. Lovely but sort of oppressive. Red efts underfoot, the overstory above. Weak light, a chill in August.
The endless shade of those looming woods.
I forgot it was summer until I drove down to town weekly, out of the hills, out of the woods, to do the laundry. The sun was in town. A pack of wild boys in the back seat, bags and baskets of dirty clothes and linens, boxes of detergent, pockets full of quarters. One boy would stuff another in a laundry cart and drive recklessly around the laundromat, while I, weary and heavy and slow, would tend the clothes, the sheets and towels.
We called it the mouse house, the evidence on kitchen surfaces each morning. The rustling in the cookie bag next to the bed, as soon as I put out the light. That exhausting summer. Eating cookies in bed, carrying my growing belly around, keeping the little boys alive in the woods. The mice, the bat in the loft, tiny jewel-like efts scattered in the drive. I remember the surrender, to those woods and all the labor.
I remember the dishes. The ceaseless tide of dishes, the endless grind of meals. The cooking, the cleaning, the cooking, the cleaning. The ravenous, busy boys and the bodies that rarely rested. Make it dirty, wash it, make it dirty, wash it, ad infinitum until death. The chore wheel of life.
It was hard.
This is less hard, but I still complain. The inconvenience! The unnavigable kitchen! I find myself policing everyone’s dish usage, even though they wash their own. I become uncomfortably aware of my current privilege, my spoiled ways. I didn’t have a dishwasher until my 30s, it was considered a luxury. “We have a dishwasher,” my stepfather would say. He meant teenage me, the dishwasher.
I’ve become so accustomed to the big box that holds, and then cleans, the dirty dishes that I forget how we lived for most of human history. Make it dirty, clean it. Do it again. Be grateful for the dish and the food on it. My house, in which I grouse about a broken dishwasher, was built in 1860 when there was no electricity. No running water. They were cold and things were dirty. They washed it or they drowned in the dirt. Dirty is a self-generating state, if you don’t clean. What is clean will inevitably be dirty. So you clean it. The ceaseless tide.
“It never ends!”
“Oh, it ends,” he says.
The dishwasher is fixed now. Steven ordered a part and pointed a fan at the wet floor. The kitchen is back to normal. I can complain about other things again, like the floors and the filthy storm windows. And the laundry …
Things to share:
Today is my father’s 80th birthday. He’s the best person I know, better than all of us. He won’t see this, given his disinterest in technology, but I wanted to toss it into the digital winds anyway: Happy Birthday, Daddy! 🎈
Heather Havrilesky captured the Sisyphean nature of housework in this essay.
“Our windows are clean or dirty, our rugs are vacuumed or covered in dog hair, our closets are a mess or well-ordered, there are dirty dishes laying about or not. These things don’t define us, no matter how stubbornly we cling to the notion that they do.”
I just learned about mammatus clouds and omg nature. These pics are stunning but also sort of apocalypse-level unsettling.
This thread is a delight, even at 100 tweets. Something to digest in pieces.
Cheers!
Lisa
My mother never had a dishwasher. It was always the question of who would wash or dry. Best conversations during the process though. I treat my dishwasher with great respect. I know what it means not to have the privilege of owning one although the intimacy sink side no longer exists...
Once upon a time I had twins & used washable nappies for a year ... Nowadays it's a GIGANTIC effort just to read the instructions of an appliance ( & thus get the best use of it ), rather than filling it up, banging it shut & switching it on. And yes, those washing/drying chatty moments. Long gone I fear