When I was much younger, my brother and I were entrusted with washing the dishes together. Little did my parents realize that it was less helping out than it was a form of punishment as we were stuck with each other for half an eternity. The evil dryer could slowly and meticulously buff a pan and then declare, “Rinse it again, I see a BUBBLE!”
“No! There is no bubble.”
“But now its wet again. So you have to redo it.”
“So dry it.”
“It touched the gross dishwater.”
The evil washer could retaliate by taking exactly five business days to wash a plate, going over with every square inch with a brillo bad.
“My hands are all pruney. Where are the gloves. That’s better. But now my hands feel weird. I have to go to the bathroom. I need hand cream. These gloves don’t fit.”
The most unkind cut at all would be washing the stoneware. Not the glazed stoneware mugs, but the pie dish or something to that nature. It made the best pies as it heated so gosh darn evenly. Of course, nowadays the stoneware isn’t such a paper weight and its beautifully glazed, but the dish in question was. It was very 70s. Plenty of browns. And browns. It was porous at least on one side and seemed to soak up water like an over water terracotta pot, which would be good for a plant if you were abandoning it for a vacation but allowed the washer to play mind games with the dryer. In fact, after cleaning/drying lots were cast, the washer could beg for the stoneware to be used.
“It’s still DARK. That mean’s its WET.”
“Then it can sit to dry. But if its dark it mean’s it’s dirty. YOU have to wash it again.” Touche’… maybe the dryer was learning to be equally as treacherous.
Our younger sis and cousins don’t know how good they have it with stoneware produced in such spritely colors and glazed in the nooks and crannies. Oh, yeah, and they most likely have a working dishwasher where they will never know the kind of feuding that occurred with children in their family a half a generation before. I should just go ahead and buy a stoneware pie pan for my dear bro, though he has probably wiped the incident from his memory in an act of repression. The horror.
