Doing the Dishes

My sister Amanda and I spent a month with our grandparents every summer after our parents got divorced. The plane ride from Atlanta to Laguardia took as long as the drive from Laguardia to Southold. 

My grandparents still lived in the house they had moved into after they got married and had added on to as they had kids. The one story house (with a mysterious basement where Pop did woodworking) had four bedrooms, one bathroom, and no dishwasher. 

From our first year there, it was established that Amanda and I would help with the dishes, to thank our grandparents for feeding and putting up with us for a month. (Our three cousins also came over every weekday, so we had fun playing with other kids, but altogether we could be a handful.) Grandma Kay did the dishes twice a day. After lunch, she washed up the breakfast and lunch dishes, and after dinner she washed up again. Normally, Pop dried. 

When we were there, Pop still dried dishes after lunch, while Amanda and I played with our cousins. After dinner Amanda and I took turns drying. She would do one night and I would do the next. This was really a small chore to ask of us while we stayed there, but from that very first year, we tried to get out of it whenever we could. We would make bets with Pop and whoever won had to take over the other's dish duty for a week. 

He bet us that sweet potatoes and yams were different things. We agreed Grandma would be the authority who decided the bet. We mobbed her as she got home from the grocery store that day. "Are yams and sweet potatoes different?" She said they were. We had to do Pop's lunch drying duty for a week. 

We bet Pop that he couldn't pull the stick out of a frozen ice pop. Grandma made ice pops by pouring juice into moulds. The five kids usually had them for an afternoon snack, around 2pm, which we called "hungry-feed-my-mouth time." The ice pop stick had holes through it, which I believed helped the ice pop better stick to the stick. We won this bet and Pop picked up our dinner drying duty for a week. 

The thing is, when I wasn't thinking of drying dishes as a chore, it was actually beautiful. My grandmother, who had just spent the day making food for five kids and then leaving us be to run wild with each other, asked me about my interests, about my friends back home, about my hobbies, and then...just listened. These were some of the moments of my childhood when I felt most heard. 

The summer when I started getting my period, I stained multiple pairs of underwear, still getting the hang of dealing with my unpredictable and occasionally overwhelming female body. We put all our laundry in one basket and Grandma Kay washed it. I was embarrassed about my underwear, but hoped they'd get dumped into the washing machine unnoticed. As we were alone together washing dishes, Grandma said, "I saw your underwear..." And I though, oh no. She said, "That used to happen to me. I hung them on the line to bleach out the stains." We were two women, talking plainly and honestly to each other. Helping each other out. 

It has been a privilege to have her in my life for so long. I have watched her get on the floor and play with my children. And I try to remember her patient, attentive listening when my kids want to talk non-stop about Minecraft and Yo Kai Watch. 

Grandma's house in Georgia, Summer 2019. Horatio and cousin Theo. Grandma Kay was still feeding us (see the tables in the background) and letting the cousins run wild.