I have a few talents. Things I've worked hard to improve on in my life. I can take pretty good photographs. I make a mean chocolate chip cookie. I can ignore housework like nobody's business. However, the talent that bemuses my husband the most is my ability to stack dishes in a dish drainer.
He and I both grew up in homes without a dishwasher. (Ok, my parents got one when I was a teenager, but that still counts as doing dishes many years without.) You would think he would understand the usefulness of such a skill. Nope. He teases me about my leaning tower of dishes and the pots and pans that bump the bottom of the cabinet (my cabinets sit about two inches lower than average.)
I can see why he's so fascinated with my stacking skills, because the man can not stack at all. He sticks the tall plates in the middle of the drainer and the big bowls in front of the small bowls and can't figure out why nothing wants to stack for him. In other things he's got great spatial perception; he just doesn't use it when standing over a sink of hot soapy water.
Lately, my stacking skillz have been allowed to rest because I have passed the dishes torch onto my oldest. I'm only doing a couple of batches of dishes a week and it's heavenly. Most of the time, she does a decent job. Every once in a while she tries to have her water too cold and we end up with greasy dishes, but other than that, she's not bad.
One area she's managing to excel: stacking. Her dish drainer sculptures make my heart proud. The other day I went to get a dish and almost took a picture. She had carefully stacked a pot on the backing racks, extended them out over the edge of the drainer, and set something else on the other end, perfectly balanced.
She has learned well, my Grasshopper.
2 comments:
From generation to generation. Its a beautiful thing. You learned from the best. However, my mother made us dry the dishes, so I had to learn the skill for myself.
You said "grasshopper" tee, hee!
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