Clean

There is a very special happy feeling linked with clean dishes. The shimmer of stainless steel. The wet happiness of a clean tabletop. The pleasant jumble of a pile drying pots and pans. The comely hanging of assorted kitchen instruments – spotlessly dangling from their assigned hooks….

Mind you, there once had been a minor kingdom of greasy stains in the sink – a small ugly city of maculate cups and spoons, a multi-layered squatters' settlement of grimy bowls and plates, with the odd black frying pan wedged in. That evil little empire existed for a short time after one of our meals – good Mummy-cooked-food which was happily consumed by us family-wallahs around our oval table. But Grime-town is history now. We have blessed, sparkling peace restored back in the kitchen.

In my growing-up days ‘washing dishes’ was a chore. Burdensome. Not-looked-forward-to-in-the-least. Us kids were supposed to ‘learn to help’ our mother. Sunday afternoons – after the big post-church lunch (which always had lots of dishes because of the spread and the inevitable guests) it was the ‘boy’s job’ to clean the dishes. A big plastic tub of soapy hot water in one sink – another tub of hot rinsing water in the other. Between the two of us brothers - we fought (gently of course) for the right to ‘rinse n dry’ instead of doing the scrubbing of the wash.

No more.

I see increasingly larger traces of my father in me the more I press into middle age and beyond. He loves cleaning things. Just loves to scrub. To say nothing of my mother. Spick-and-span is her middle name. Throughout most of my moderately-slovenly youth cleanliness was hardly my scene. Old genes however – or perhaps we should say old memes – show up unexpectedly. Just add a new gen of Eichers and the older gen seems to revert to type.

The cleaning bug is very much in me.

Having recently moved into a new flat – one which reduced a person a dearly love to tears because of its grimy kitchen – I have many opportunities to hone my craft. Little bits of time are sequestered away – to scrub a corner here – to de-grime a set of switches there – to get out the steel wool and give a real elbow-grease rubdown of the floor over there again…

There are still areas where skirmishes are still to take place – but the battle of Eicher vs. Grime is gradually tipping the way of the former name.

Amidst the on-going campaign to scrub up our home – here is a small daily experience of partnering pleasure in the home: the pleasant 'click' of switching off the light on a clean kitchen at the end of the day. Just knowing that all the dishes are happily drying on their racks (with a further clean-n-dry group having been scooted into their places to make way for the wetties) - and that your damp shirt and tired hands have made is possible - is a small but tangible daily pleasure for yours truly.