Kitchen Sinks & Closets (Part 2)
As I sit here writing this, I am resisting the urge to go downstairs to my kitchen and clean the dishes that are piling up in my kitchen sink. They have been there for two days already, which for me feels like two weeks. I am, admittedly, a “neat freak” although I prefer “fastidious” or “tidy” to “freak” (or the even more loathsome “anal-retentive”). I like things put away. I like things in their place. Yes, I’m that person who straitens picture frames and fluffs pillows as I make my way from one room to another. And, yes, I am that person who likes the dishes done before going to bed so that I can wake up to a clutter free kitchen in the morning.
The rest of my family—not so much.
Most nights, I make a final sweep through the kitchen before heading up to bed to make sure the last spoon or mug has been put away, thus ensuring that I will be able to enjoy my morning Chemex routine in a clean kitchen. Yesterday, however, I awoke to a sink full of spoons and bowls and midnight snack detritus (none of which was due to my imbibing). With great irritation I put my foot down and refused to clean it, even against my natural impulse. This protest went largely unnoticed and lead to my subsequent refusal to prepare dinner that night, too, since none of the other members of my family blinked an eye at the condition of the sink earlier that day. I mean, seriously! I could not, in good conscious and respect for my own time clean their dishes in order to make space to prepare their dinner!
But alas . . . my dinner protest went unnoticed as well. My two semi-adult daughters simply grazed their way through the evening mealtime and my husband found something to smear peanut butter on. WTF?
So, to my deep disappointment, not only are the same dishes in the sink this morning, but none in my family even so much as noticed that their “housekeeper” has gone on strike. What to make of this? Are my roommates simply ungrateful slobs? Have I been too indulgent as a mother? Too much of a doormat? Too controlling? Perhaps. But then again . . . maybe there is another way to look at this. Perhaps something truer.
The kitchen is arguably the most important room in the house. Even a house without a kitchen has some space designated as such—even if its just a shelf with a microwave, or as in the stories my mother tells of her dorm days . . . an iron used for making grilled cheese sandwiches (which reveals that she went to college in the 60s because no college student today living in a dorm irons their clothes!). The kitchen is where the food is. And food is where life is. Let’s face it, we are animals. We are still guided by our most primal needs: food, safety, and for most . . . companionship. This is the stuff that sustains life. And his is the stuff that is found in the kitchen.
In my house, I am pretty much the boss of the kitchen, mostly because I do the most cooking. And I do most of the cooking because I like to. I like the creativity of putting flavors and textures together. After a day of working with computers and books and people drama, I like doing something with my hands—something messy. I like the alchemy of turning raw ingredients into a three-dimensional experience for other people. And perhaps most importantly, I like putting my ear pods in and tuning out the world while listening to a podcast as I rinse, chop and saute things—a kind of alone time that doesn’t feel indulgent because it is in service of my family. Cooking offers moments of mediation, stillness, quiet, creativity, and comfort. Not always, but often. For me, most of the time, cooking is a joy—one of the most beautiful aspects of the kitchen.
The flip side of that, however, are dishes. Dirty dishes. Dishes that must be cleaned. The aftermath of that gloriously creative time is messy, ugly, nagging. And unfortunately, in my house, I am the one who mostly responds to that old nag.
But what if it wasn’t a chore to have to do dishes? What if doing the dishes could offer me some of the same break from computers, books and people drama that cooking does? Actually, now that I think about it, it does just that. Doing the dishes, while certainly less “pretty” than cooking, does provide me a chance to use my hands. To plug in my podcast and ignore the world around me. To feel the satisfaction of “getting something done” (and even better, something in service and care of my family, no matter how ungrateful they may seem to be). Sometimes, doing the dishes even offers me rare glimpses of something beautiful (dare I say sacred?) in the fleeting glimmer of afternoon light caught in a drop of water off the rim of a mason jar, the joyful sound of the neighbor girls eating popsicles in their backyard, or the hungry tweets from the baby birds whose nest sways in the palm tree near the kitchen window. If not for those dishes nagging to be cleaned, I would miss those little blessings.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t always get a blessing from doing the dishes. Nor do I always feel joyful cooking. My family eats plenty of meals from greasy paper sacks. And, once in a azure moon when someone in my family feels inspired to cook (often in response to my cajoling) I am more than happy to step down as kitchen boss. That goes double for dishes. But I do believe in the sacred power of the kitchen. And that goes for the lowly kitchen sink as well. It holds the power to provide sustenance, energy, comfort and care. It asks for time and often communion. And beyond that, it provides a space of creativity, pause, and retrospection.
Many an epiphany has come to me at the kitchen sink. Don’t tell my family, but its possible the kitchen sink is my church—where I commune with myself and with God and with all of the most humble and necessary matters of life. Perhaps I need to do dishes . . . like I need to say my prayers.
(But again . . . don’t tell my family. They don’t need to know all of my secrets. And I still want them to put their damn spoons in the dishwasher!)