It’s Sunday morning. I got up around six, before the curtain of night began to give way to the hot winter’s sun. It is stabbing now, killed the night and lights every corner outside, trying to find its way into the house and push everyone else out of bed. I did my usual wake up routine with coffee and a couple of tablets to help reduce inflammation and supplement my diet with vitamins and minerals, because the food pyramid and the diet I am not neither one provides enough from the foods I am recommended to eat. Then I took on a mountain of crockery that stood stacked high next to the kitchen sink.
While I washed and rinsed and stacked, I thought about the time recently when one of my daughters looked on at me washing the dishes kind of gleefully, and she asked why I liked doing the dishes so much lately. I have taken a break from doing them for years now, because in order to do them, I have to don some ridiculous looking long gloves that appear to be for preg-testing cattle. They are durable enough to give comfort to a man who is shoulder deep in a Heffer. They don’t contribute to the gentle nature required for some of the finer glassware, any they are an unnatural grip on any of the crocks. I don’t love doing the dishes that way, so my generous family has kept up on the chore while I took on other responsibilities that they are not well suited to. Feeding the livestock counts as one. Dealing with the firewood till it is split and stacked for winter is another.
My daughter is too young to have experienced years of feeling like a part of her life has been taken from her. But that’s what I feel. Years of my life have been spent feeling insufficient to keep up with some of the most basic household chores. But due to a change in diet and the inflammation diminishing for it, and due to my skin not cracking up leaving my hands feel like each has an hundred papercuts that feel like alcohol has been poured into them when they are submerged in hot soapy water, I have been able to do the dishes without suffering. That has been for me, much more than a welcomed relief. It has made me feel like I have been reborn into a new life.
It is such a simple thing, but I harken back to my grandfather and I going out for breakfast at one of the diners that once existed in Lompoc, CA. While we were there, a bubbly blonde waitress started her shift. It was a quiet Sunday morning, a bit like today. The sin was bright, and the red Beetle she drove up in glistened in the sun. She virtually exploded with happiness as she came into the large room and the chef called out from the kitchen and said her car looked really clean. She was so happy about this and went on about it and how she felt so good because it was. I was a bit awestruck by this attitude, and how something so simple made her so happy. I have always admired that moment in time, and the I have always treasured that little memory for the time spent with my grandfather and seeing such an example of how life can be filled with small things that make a person absolutely radiate with happiness. I have kept it, and now you can have a part.
It’s holding on to that and thigs like it that have made me to be happy to get back the ability to do a chore. I know that hose kids certainly appreciate me doing it. They say thank you, and I kind of grumble that they don’t need to. They don’t know what it means to me not do it and not just be repulsed by the pain, and they don’t know what it is like to have an ability taken from you, then to have to live with it for so long. The kids don’t appreciate what it means to feel like you are not doing your part or pulling your weight. Then to have that ability restored! It is a momentous event and can only be celebrated by living up to what you can do. It seems such a little thing to be able to do dishes, but in my mind, it is a red Beetle, glistening in the sun. And I know how to react to that. I was shown.