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Rinse and repeat no more

3 min read

The day we moved in, we could tell by the look of it that this was not a newfangled, high-efficiency, impressive dishwasher. Its rough black front door gave it away. This dishwasher was made sometime between the trends of avocado green and stainless steel.

But would it clean dishes? Our first load answered that.

Yes, it splashed hot water on the dishes, and yes, it made noises like it was really working hard inside there. But the truth was, not much was happening when I closed and locked the door.

Dishes emerged dirty, but dirty in a way that was different from when we put them in there. Cereal would be on drinking glasses and yogurt from the blender cup would be stuck to the silverware. Peanut butter from knives ended up as widely dispersed as blocks of government cheese.

“We just have to rinse the dishes first,” said the farmer, knowing full well that any replacement dishwasher would require him to lug it into the house and install it.

So “rinse and repeat” became the rule of the house. I rinsed dinner plates so thoroughly they shined like new pennies, causing me to wonder whether I should just buy a drying rack and go back to the old days of washing by hand. Wouldn’t that be the same as all this pre-washing?

This was a petulant appliance, willing to do its job, but only if we did the hard work first. A good pre-rinsing would get us a reasonably clean result from it.

But sometimes my daughter would load the dishwasher without pre-rinsing. Later, I would open the door to find all the coffee mugs covered with cereal barnacles.

Every time I find myself getting annoyed by the failings of modern conveniences, I think of Ma Ingalls and her wooden bowls and spoons. She had to wash the dinner dishes in a tub in the side yard out on the prairie. And she didn’t have Dawn liquid, or even suds. Her dishpan hands were probably from lye soap.

Still, all suffering is relative and personal. After limping along with the dishwasher, I reached my breaking point. Wanting a drink of water, I took down four glasses before I found one that didn’t have schmootz stuck all over it. A girl could die of thirst.

Our new dishwasher is a wonder, like having a beautiful celebrity living in my kitchen. She is sleek and silvery and computerized. She does her work so quietly you can’t tell if it’s running or not.

And then you open the door to find that, yes, she was working. While I was sleeping, that dishwasher was dousing our bowls and plates and coffee mugs with torrents of hot water, getting into all the small places before rinsing and drying them.

Unloading the dishwasher used to be my least favorite household chore, but no more. It’s a joy to lift sparkly juice glasses out of the rack. OK, that’s an exaggeration and something you’d see in a Cascade commercial, but still.

Maybe this is how Ma Ingalls felt when Pa traded construction work for a used set of real china dishes. Those wooden bowls must have been almost impossible to get clean.

Although our old dishwasher was inferior, it still had some life left in it. The farmer put it on the curb with a sign that read, “Works, sort of. Free.”

Someone scooped it up that afternoon. I hope they know to rinse first.

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