Last Sunday, my family came over for dinner and to visit. After we'd eaten, I realized the dishwasher was already filled so we'd have to wash the dishes by hand.
As the sink filled with soap suds, I remembered the days when everybody washed the dishes by hand. When I was a young girl, my mom's family gathered every Sunday after church for dinner at my grandparents' house, and everyone chipped in for clean-up duties.
My relatives had the assembly line down pat, and I'm not sure if today's young people -- reared on paper plates, take-out Styrofoam boxes and cheap plastic cups -- know there's a system for efficiently washing dishes by hand.
When heated debates about politics and football ended, everyone chipped in for kitchen duty. Some cousins were charged with scraping the food into an old milk carton so it could be added to the compost pile, and the uncles put the leftovers in smaller bowls and then in the refrigerator.
My grandfather was always at the head of the line to wash the dishes. He taught me to fill the sink with hot, soapy water and put a tablespoon of household bleach in the water to serve as a disinfectant.
Wash the glasses first, he said, because they needed the cleanest and hottest water possible to stay sparkling clean.
He showed me how to wash the inside of the glass, being careful to swab the bottom of the milk glasses. Next he said to wash the rim and then rinse the glass in clear, running water.
After all the glasses were clean, my grandfather said to refill the sink with hot soapy water, add a bit of bleach again, and then wash the utensils.
"Think about it," he told me, holding a fork up to the window. "People put this in their mouths. Make sure they're really clean."
As the glasses, utensils and plates moved on to the dish drainer, aunts, who talked nonstop, took turns drying them and putting them away in the cabinets.
Last but not least were the pots and pans. Before the invention of rice cookers and microwaves, there was always a stack of heavy-duty cleaning on the drain board.
Washing pots and pans was usually unpleasant if we'd forgotten to fill the pans with water so they could soak. It took a lot of elbow grease and the trusty Chore Girl scrub pad to loosen baked-on rice in the bottom of a pot or on the side of my grandmother's blue enamel roaster.
As the assembly line moved efficiently in the kitchen, someone made sure the leaf came out of the dining room table and my grandmother's bowl of plastic fruit was back in the center of the table.
When the last pot was dried and the drainer was empty, my uncles retired to the living room to watch football and my aunts sat around the kitchen table, sharing hot coffee, pie and more talk.
They'd reminisce about the old days, give each other advice about life and relax now that the work was finished. Those days are some of my favorites from my childhood, and I'm glad I was part of a large, extended family that laughed, argued and cried together.
As I washed the dishes and my daughter-in-law dried them, our sons, granddaughter and my husband cleared the table and took care of the chores that accompany a family dinner. All the while, we laughed and talked.
There's a rhythm in a kitchen, the give and take of seemingly mundane talk of family and friends that accompanies worthwhile tasks and puts a finishing touch on a slow Sunday afternoon.
This article originally appeared in the Fort Bend Herald.
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