A Noble Chore

The table has been cleared, and the last of your dinner guests has been ushered out into the night. The previous days' tumult of planning, shopping, and cooking has yielded another evening to remember--and a sink full of sauce-smeared plates and grease-smudged stemware. In the prostprandial hush, you calmly take stock of the task at hand and begin your labor. Working unhurriedly from the top of the pile, your hands gripping the soapy sponge, you work rhythmically as your body warms to the task and your mind, stoked by food and conversation, quiets itself. Call us old-fashioned, ascetic, or even slightly masochistic, but there's something about hand-washing dishes that we find, well, cleansing

#36 of Saveur's 10th Annual Top 100 list
--David Sax, January Saveur

This struck a chord with me. Our dishwasher broke a couple of weeks ago and the cheapest way to go was to start washing everything by hand.

I have a fondness for washing dishes by hand. Some of this may be linked to my uncanny ability to stack an incredible number of things in the dish drainer ... how often do I get to exercise this skill to the acclaim and amazement of my family? Not that often.

It also provides the equally intangible enjoyment of chatting with anyone who happens to stop off and dry a few glasses (this happens much more often than you'd think), let one's mind idly wander on any number of subjects which one might perhaps interlace with a prayer here and there, listen to music or a story ... or whatever.

Perhaps it is the regularity of this enforced task. Dishes, after all must be washed frequently or there is nothing to put our dinner upon. It provides at least twice a day (more on weekends!) during which conversation, pondering, or listening are the only options. Despite the work, which is admittedly light, in its own way dishwashing is restful.