Meditations on Washing Dishes

Washing dishes is my flow state. Each time, I follow the same routine. I throw a dish towel over my shoulder, put on my headphones, and listen to music or an audiobook, and as soon as I start to scrub down my vintage Corelle bowls, the ones my parents received as a wedding present, and plates, so like the ones my grandmother owned, my mind starts wandering through fields of words.

I get all my best ideas while I wash and dry, ideas for new stories or whole conversations between characters or insights into life. I’m constantly running into the next room to capture some idea before it slips away, sometimes I get it down in time, sometimes the words have already evaporated and I can only sketch out the gist of whatever it was.

My love affair with dishes started when I was a child. We didn’t have a dishwasher until I was around maybe 12 or so. At first, my older sister and I were the primary dish washers and when she left for college I graduated from dryer to washer and gained an able assistant in our family friend Pat.

Pat’s father sent him to an orphanage after his mother died when he was a small boy and he eventually ended up on the streets in Detroit until he joined the army. He was weeks away from shipping out to Vietnam when he developed double pneumonia and through the combination of several health problems was discharged with full disability instead.

The quality that made Pat a truly exceptional human being was his endless store of gratitude. Even with all he suffered he would recount stories that pulled out his few lucky breaks and examined them from all angles as though they were the most precious of jewels. I heard the tale of his narrow escape from the horrors of Vietnam over and over while I was growing up. Only to someone like Pat, could catching double pneumonia and having the complications sentence him to a life of pain and breathing problems, be considered a blessing.

My family met Pat when I was five or six. He had purchased a large house with a yard for his beloved poodle Blackie and after Blackie had suddenly passed away, he was devasted and lonely in the house by himself.

My family was in the process of moving back to Colorado after a year in California and we needed someplace to live while we figured out our long-term plans.

We moved into Pat’s house, and he ended up living with my parents all his life, until he passed away in his own bed, on his birthday, the day after Christmas, in 2015.

At the time Pat and I pulled KP duty together we were living in an old farmhouse on forty acres of land next to Black Canyon State Park in western Colorado. The view out the kitchen window was of rolling farm fields and wide-open sky. I would gaze out at all that beauty and Pat would tell me stories about his life or regale me with the corniest jokes known to man.

Pat loved to make people laugh, and he had a sort of chortling chuckle that was very endearing, and so we would pass the time content in each other’s company.

Washing dishes was also my favorite job during my time working on a cruise ship in Alaska the year after I graduated from high school. It was a small ship and most of the staff were responsible for both cleaning rooms and serving meals. One week out of six I was the dishwashing assistant instead of a waitress. That was by far my favorite week.

I had gone to the cruise ship to try and overcome almost crippling shyness and although I learned how to talk to people, waitressing was still more people interaction than I was comfortable with at the time.

Besides, dishwashing was way for more fun! We would blast music, sing, dance around, and have soap bubble fights. The one CD that everyone in the kitchen could agree on was Queen’s Greatest Hits, which is an excellent accompaniment to physical work, I highly recommend it.

Professional dishwashing came back into my life after I was laid off from my first office job in 2008. I had to work three jobs to make ends meet and along with returning to work at a movie theater and delivering newspapers in the early morning hours, I started washing dishes for large events at the museum where my brother worked as a chef.

This stint of dishwashing would end up being life-changing for me as I worked my way up over nine years from dishwasher to heading the theater department for the museum. I also met my future husband while I worked there.

These days washing dishes is a chance to spend time with my thoughts, it’s a break from being on for my husband and my kids. It has grown from being a way to connect with the ones around me to a way to connect with myself and with people who are no longer here.

As my hands prune from the water, my mind wanders, sometimes back across the years to memories of dishes past or sometimes I recreate my beloved cruise days and I dance around my kitchen.

When you think about it, washing dishes is something people have done for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, your mom washed dishes and her mom and so forth back in a continuous line of people showing their care for their families, themselves, and their possessions.

I can picture my mother's and my grandmother's hands covered in soap bubbles, a dishtowel slung over their shoulders, sweat running down their faces. If you didn't care about them maybe that wouldn't be a pretty image, but to me, they were beautiful.

I never looked at their hands with their gnarled joints and age spots and thought they were ugly, even though maybe they did. I never looked at them, working to make a home for me, and saw anything but beauty.

In our society we focus so much on outward appearances, we spend so much time making ourselves look better, that we forget that the people we love are beautiful because we love them. We forget that when we looked at the mothers and grandmothers and Pats who cared for us, all we saw was that caring.

We forget that the people that love us, love us because of the care we show for them.

We spend ourselves during the course of our life. We spend our time, our energy, our love. But what is the best way to spend ourselves? What investment will have the greatest return?

To that, I say, love.

Spend yourself on loving, spend yourself on caring.

I don't mean spend yourself on those too selfish to realize your value or don't care for yourself to the point where you break down.

Just throw yourself with wild, joyful abandon into caring for and loving others and you will find that, as time goes on, even the simple act of washing a dish will be imbued with a lifetime of love.