“They” say one of the sexiest things a man can do is wash dishes.
I’m not sure who “they” is, and I’m not really sure what is sexy about washing dishes, but “they” must know what “they” are talking about. Maybe it’s all the bubbles and the slipperiness and the steamy hot water. I don’t know…
I will tell you I have been doing a lot of dishes lately because our dishwasher broke a few months back and we haven’t replaced it yet. There’s no particular reason that we haven’t replaced it, we just haven’t done it. It’s like a lot of the stuff on the “to do list” around our house, it’s part of old house living… stuff breaks and eventually it gets fixed but sometimes it takes a few years. In any case, for a family of four we use roughly the same volume of dishes and cups and glasses and silverware each day as a cafeteria on a college campus. The dirty dishes pile up high on the kitchen counter… glasses and silverware stacked precariously on top of bowls and plates, waiting for a cat to walk by and with a brush of a tail make it all come tumbling down. When the counter fills up, then the sink starts to fill up. It often culminates with a kid yelling out some inane comment like “there’s no forks!”
So, I wash dishes. I usually turn the radio on to a nice classical station to get myself… you know… in the mood. We have one of those old cast iron sinks with two basins, so I fill one side with hot, soapy water and then transfer the clean and rinsed items over to the other side which has a dish drainer in it. Pulling each dish from the dirty pile is kind of like playing that kids game where each player has to remove a piece from a tower made of blocks… you pull out a block ever so gently and hope the whole structure doesn’t come crashing down. Yeah, it’s kind of like that…
I won’t take all the sexiness credit here… my wife does her share of the dishes also. We split that chore mostly equally. The kids? They never do the dishes, because frankly they’re lazy and more importantly, they’re much too young to be developing sex appeal by washing dishes. I can tell you straight out though, that I’m not feeling any sexier than I did when we had a working dishwasher. Maybe I’m not doing it right. Maybe I need to be washing dishes in a Hugh Heffner style silk smoking jacket or something. Then when my wife walks by I’ll say something like, “hey baby, welcome to my palace of sex and dirty dishes. Watch me chisel the dry crusted SpaghettiO’s out of this bowl.”
Okay, so maybe washing dishes isn’t really that sexy. Maybe “they” don’t really know what “they” are talking about. Maybe “they” are folks that don’t have kids and don’t have piles of dirty dishes lying all over the house, covered in cement-crusted food that requires power tools to remove. Maybe “they” are folks who are washing up a few pieces of fine china and crystal after consuming a four-star meal and a couple of bottles of wine and who end up having sex on the dining room table. Yeah, okay, admittedly that could be sexy… sex on the dining room table. Unfortunately ours is covered in… more dirty dishes… and mail… and kids toys… and folded laundry.
Hey, you know what “they” say about folding laundry… that’s one of the sexiest things a man can do!
The Brown Road Chronicles 