I plunge my hands into the warm sudsy water and gaze out the window at my tulips, and that’s when it happens.
I relax into the slow, methodical act of washing dishes by hand. I feel a connection to all the women who ever washed dishes or a baby in the kitchen sink.
No, my dishwasher isn’t broken. I decided to turn off my cell phone, and then I wondered if other modern conveniences have robbed me of some of the simple everyday past pleasures in life? There’s a gap between what my mind and body need, and I need to get creative to fight the fragmentation of the real world. Maybe that gap grows with all these time-saving devices? So I decided to wash the dishes in the sink. Something I’ve not done in years.
My first bath was in the kitchen sink. You can fit a baby or two in a large sink. You can’t beat fun like that. Add a red hat, like my mother did when she bathed my niece, and you’re really having some fun.
I think of all the women who spent so much time at their kitchen sinks. I see my grandmother there with the window open on a hot Minnesota summer day. She could see her apple tree and hear the birds from her kitchen window. I’ll bet she did her best creative thinking at that sink, and she designed and made all her children’s clothes. They had the most original outfits in town. One man complained to his wife, “Why can’t our kids have cute outfits like those Falk kids?”
As her children slept, her Singer® sewing machine hummed through the night. Maybe she was designing that pleated skirt and matching vest for my mother over the kitchen sink? Alone with her own thoughts for the first time all day, her hands washed the breakfast dishes, but her mind worked on new patterns for outfits. Or maybe she was thinking about all the latest trials her children confided in her.
Now and then I need to have my hands in some warm water and soothing suds, open the window over the sink, and hum. Not the hum of the automatic dishwasher.
I never know what the bubbles might bring forth from the recesses of my childhood. I just know that now and then I need a good hum among the suds.