The Art of Dishwashing

(This post was originally published at the blog Grass People. Read it at http://aworldofgrasspeople.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-art-of-dish-washing.html.)

Growing up, my mom was always queen of the kitchen. Well, she still is, even though her kingdom is smaller now that my brother and I are out of the house. After every meal, the queen would take her position of royalty at the soapy sink as her three subjects would diligently bring over the dirty dishes and scrape leftovers into the rectangle glass Pyrex containers. Mom would submerge her hands into the suds and gently scrub the grime and grease from the pots and pans. There was something magical about the way her hands were always covered in the soap bubbles whenever she’d take her hands out of the water. It was almost like a magical sort of glove that shimmered in the light from the single bulb over the sink.

Actually, everything about my mom’s dish washing seemed magical. After dinnertime in the winter, it was always so dark outdoors that our sliding glass door would become rather like a mirror, reflecting everything that the light from the lamp above the kitchen table hit. Mom always made sure we closed the curtain because she didn’t want people outside watching us wandering around in our well-lit kitchen like some people on a television screen. If we kept the big light over the counter off, then the light above the table would reflect off of the curtain and tablecloth, reflecting warm light over the entire kitchen.

The additional light from the single bulb over Mom’s place of honor kind of gave her the appearance of residing beneath a spotlight at center stage. This splendidly tranquil aura of the kitchen combined the enchanting hollow clunking sounds of the dishes beneath water and the clean smell of the soap contributed to the magic. Another part of the wizardry was how my mom could hold her hands and forearms in that boiling water for so long. Golly gee, she liked it hot. I quickly learned that Leah’s heat tolerance would not be able to tolerate the sort of heat that Sarah’s heat tolerance could tolerate. In other words, I learned to not put my hand in the water or stick a finger under the running faucet when Mom was at the sink.

But the most magical part of it all was the amount of enjoyment that went into that act of dish washing. I never really realized it then, in those days at home, cleaning up after dinner with the family, but my mom actually loved washing dishes. She loved the warmth (or should I say scalding heat) of the water and the smell of the soap and the calm of the kitchen. She was a queen in those moments. That kitchen was her throne room.

I guess all those hours I spent in my childhood observing my mom doing the dishes explains why it bothers me when I see people doing the dishes wrong. And when I say “wrong,” it’s not like they’re skipping the soap or something. It’s just not an event for them. They don’t milk the moment. They don’t become royalty when they take the sponge in hand. If they’re not enjoying it—if they’re not gloriously covering their forearms in suds—then they’re doing it wrong.

So now, here I am, in a (albeit temporary) place of my own, and one of the highlights of each evening is washing my dishes after dinner. It’s like some sort of sacred ritual. I turn my music up loud, let the hot water run into the plugged sink, and warble away as the music plays and as my hands tingle in the hot, soapy water. And I don’t know if it’s just that the hot water in my apartment doesn’t get super hot or what, but I always turn the water as hot as it can go, and only every once in a while do my hands start to feel like they’re being scalded. Scalding or no, I love it. I feel like a queen of my mother’s line.

As my mom always says, it’s the little things in life. And, as Laura Ingalls Wilder once wrote, “The true way to live is to enjoy every moment as it passes; it is in the everyday things around us that the beauty of life lies.” What a blessing it is to be able to find so much joy and magic in such a simple thing as washing dishes.

But that’s just how our God works. He, after all, is the one that inspired Paul to say in Colossians all that about working for the Lord with all of your heart in “whatever you do.” He knows the treasures to be found in the small things, and he designed those things for a purpose.

I guess that includes the art of dish-washing.