Day 8
Counter Lessons
by Lyn Carr
August 10, 2010
“I hate to load a dishwasher and even more than that I hate unloading it.” We both laughed, kindred spirits in the dishwashing world. I knew just what Mary Jo meant. And, I knew exactly why.
In the fifties when my father would bring out his little grill, and set it up in the backyard, we knew we were having his barbcued steak. My favorite dish ever. Because we saw the grill so seldom there was magic and mystery about the aluminum body with the small grill on one side with two round holes for the little bowls or small pots on the other. He created a spaghetti meat sauce and his own kind of sweet, kind of sour barbecue sauce we loved. He always made baked beans in the oven, too, and heavenly scents of onion, sauce and beans wafted through the overheated house.
We weren’t allowed in the kitchen. I swear he must have opened the doors to all the cabinets planned the following, I’ll use every other dish for the beans, every third plate, bowl and pan of those left, and finished his cooking off with all but two dishes in the entire cabinets. Even the ones way up by the ceiling I had to get a chair to stand on. Who did the sink and tile counters stained with red, and dishes that spread like amoeba tentacles all over the tile counters? My brother and I.
In the evening after dinner, I washed and Floyd dried, both of us sweating over the sink in the tiny little kitchen that had no moving ventilation in it. Oh, this was Texas, San Antonio to be exact and temperatures ranged from 85 to 95 every day in the summers. I suppose the sweat just dripped into the hot water; who would have known, anyway: Over time, when my bother and I both left our home daddy’s delectable barbecue sauce be damned; we hated doing dishes. At least, that was the underlying cause for the counter wars that began for me once I was married.
After we married, my ex-husband bought us a dishwasher and since I was busy playing the good little housewife, we divided up the chores. He took care of doing the yard, watering the lawn, the mowing, the weed whacking, garbage cans on Fridays, laundry, and, oh thank God for small favors, the kitty litter box in the basement. When he decided to build rooms in the basement, the basement was his.
My domain was inside and upstairs, the kitchen, cooking and cleaning, vacuuming and dusting, decorating to a litany of his criticism, planting flowers and bushes in the flower beds in the front yard, and the garden. The kitchen counters were not so much of a problem in that house, just the sink. The kitchen counters were L-shaped, very well laid out and I had a nice long counter where I could prepare foods, bake, and make desserts to my heart’s content in order to please him. Keeping the counters clean wasn’t much of a problem. Maybe it was in that house where I started leaving dishes in the sink, I don’t know. My mom, on one of her rare visits commented on it saying only, “Always keep the sink cleared. Men don’t like a cluttered sink.” What did my mother know?
My ex and I divorced. I sold the house. Looking, I turned down two places with larger rooms and lower price tags because the was hardly any cabinet space and you could see right into the kitchen from the living room.
I chose the condo where I live now in spite of the galley kitchen which I hated for years. I knew looking at it the first time that it wasn’t going to be a good place to cook. I had no idea how I could come loathe working in it. No one else could be in it at the same time. What I I knew for sure is I adored the whole 8’ by 8’ walls of shelves at one end, and God knows more cabinets i than I’d seen since my search for a condo began. In fact, it’s got more cabinets than I have seen in any condo galley kitchen since.
At first, of course, caught up in the newness of home ownership, I kept everything spotless, including the kitchen sink. No matter what was in the sink, I’d clear it, and every Sunday, I’d make it the spotless place I loved.
However, over time, and as I got physically sicker, began as one dish, then another in the sink, was like that garbage disposal cleaner you put down it and run a trickle of hot water on it until it bubbles blue foam into the sink and with a loud suck, pulls all the foam back down. Not so for me. The foam of dishes bubbled up and out over and onto the counters. In “89 my ENT tested and found I had 11 food allergies, corn, wheat, sugar, cheeses, fermented products, and soy. So, that meant I had to cook almost everything from scratch with foods I’d never heard of. Things like Kamut, Spelt, and ugh, seaweed and Quinoa. No one else had either, I was certain, not in Denver, maybe even the whole world.
The battle with the counters and sink began. At that time, it would take me a day or two to clean the kitchen and make it look like I wanted; a picture book home with spotless counters, cleared of anything but essentials. Like my friend Dick’s kitchen that looked like no one ever cooked in it and Colorado Architecture had to have just left after doing a layout on his house in their magazine. “I use my kitchen,” I insisted, justifying my failure to stem the tide of one failure after another in the War on Counters.
Food left in the sink for a few day grew mold and in the garbage cans making that terrible smell that it does when food spoils. There were times I had only trails to walk through in my home I had so much in it, but had so little energy that it was all I could do to get up the stairs after making my food for the next day, work from sunrise until dark, cook my supper, make my lunch and snacks and start all over again. At one point, for a few months, I even left food trays in my room at school and didn’t take them down to the cafeteria for days.
When Dr. Nonas, my ENT and environmental allergy doctor tested me, he found I was allergic to eleven foods, to molds and to pollens “and” had an underlying condition that caused even my reactions to mold growing in my classrooms where I taught. Having become almost phobic about the foods I had tried to eat and everything seeming to make me sick, his registered dietician/nutritionist developed a rotating diet with two weeks of menus for me, and I began to eat food again, quit having upper respiratory infections from October to March, and began to put on the nearly 20 pounds of weight I’d lost. I found a cleaning lady who could smell and recognized mold when she smelled it, who spent a lot of time on my kitchen when she came every two weeks and began to teach me things I didn’t know about cleaning my home like taking out the garbage more regularly. In fact, she did it for me; I wasn’t able to do it at the time.
I struggled in between her visits cleaning with the it’s-okay for a few days, then, clutter began bubbling up and over onto the counters and there was no way I could cook when I had to spend a day or two clearing everything in the kitchen out of the way. I gave up sometimes, but, would start again.
I tried everything; yellling and berating myself, grumbling and resenting, enlisting help of people I hired in between visits to do some of cleaning for me when I couldn’t. Of course, it didn’t work. I almost gave up, but started again and again. The war continued.
As I got physically better, little by little I let go of trying to cook “everything” from scratch and learned how to rotate my foods without the menus. I bought a few prepared foods at the store when I began having vertigo and couldn’t bend over even a little to get dishes out of the sink, load the dishwasher, or look for a pan in the lower cabinets. I rearranged my kitchen two or three times and each time it functioned more efficiently for me. I purchased the side-by-side the 25 cubic fridge I mentioned last night and room for loaves of Spelt, and pasta made from Kamut, from Whole Foods at a health food store that had just opened in Cherry Creek.
Certain I’d died and gone to heaven, literally, the first time I walked the aisles, I was ecstatic. Here was place I could actually buy flours like Spelt and Kamut, get pancake mixes, loaves of baked bread, no sourdough yet, but it was coming.
When I found those flours in the bulk aisle, I began keeping the sink and the largest counter in my kitchen free for baking my own tortillas and eating pancakes and waffles made from grains that, to Dick who was a chef, tasted like cardboard. To me, they were the most wonderful tasting bread I’d ever eaten. I didn’t get sick after I ate it. Counters in my kitchen were covered with rolled balls of dough for spelt tortillas. I learned to roll them out, got a baking stone, and even baked them, and if I froze them, didn’t have to do it again for two more weeks. My cleaning lady always came the next day and cleared what I couldn’t. Flour might have been spirinkled on counters, dropped on the floor, and she just took care of it for me.
My house and kitchen began to smell better and better between visits and I got better and better, too. She got after me to always empty the garbage once a week, clean the sink and the battle continued until July 1 of 2010.
I’ve now lived here from November of 1985 to July of 2010 right? I was still losing the war. Even taking photos of before and after de-cluttering didn’t help for long. Oh, de-cluttering began taking less and less time until it required only two hours to really have the counters and sink look passable, but I still couldn’t or wouldn’t cook when the sink was full of dishes.
Then came the second wave of water damage to my home and everything. This time, movers packed every item in my living room and basement to a warehouse so new carpet and a living room ceiling could be laid. Those two or three weeks of living with nothing but a chair to watch television, the television, a computer desk and chair, my kitchen and overly crammed bedrooms that I could hardly move in brought insights I hadn’t expected. I began developing a new respect for my precious kitchen. I had time to think about what changes to make, and new cleaning people who I really didn’t want to pay for washing dishes. Slowly I began experimenting. There was nothing else to do.
I tried keeping the sink empty. No luck. Two days and it was back to bubbling over with prepared food cartons, plastic containers and some where along in the last few months I began recycling and letting that sit for a week or two. I noticed that my “garbage” shrunk to one bag from four every two weeks. I came up with different solutions, and when they didn’t work, I came up with more and tried them.
Then, just before the pack-in started, I cleaned the counter on the right side of the sink. I kept it de-cluttered no matter what. Suddenly, I was motivated to empty and shine the sink. I donated everything but essential items from the small counter on the left of the sink. It was there I set dishes to be washed and when it was full, I soaked the dishes and loaded the dishwasher. My God, I’d stumbled on something that worked. it only took me 25 years. I spent a few seconds in regret and embarrassed, stuck out my fist, pulled it back shouting, “YES!”
On July 6 I left for Texas and visited a friend I hadn’t seen for twenty years, at least, and as I searched through her sparkling glass shelves for dinner food because she was too busy with planned activities and couldn’t be home, I began to see how she arranged not only her fridge, but also, her kitchen. The next morning I said, “Nicci, you can put more food on refrigerator shelves than anyone I’ve ever known. You’re amazing.” Nicci turned, gave me that look I hadn’t seen in a long time and said, “Lyn, you need to get out more.” She added, “My friends used to say at Christmas and Thanksgiving, “Find a water melon, and Nikki would get it in the refrigerator.”
Every little achievement, cleaning one shelf and the next day another instead of tackling the whole refrigerator at once is a big accomplishment. Removing a few things at a time on my kitchen table. Keeping the sink empty of everything but soaking dishes nine days out of ten. Each little achievement motivates me to do more. I don’t have to scale the Mount Everest of dirty dishes in the sink on one day, I can do it, one dish and one counter at a time.
Who knew.
