DOING DISHES WITH ABUELA

Abuela had that look after dinner. In the weeks following the surgery for her broken hip, my one-hundred-year-old grandmother has become increasingly bored and restless. Though her injury confines her to a wheelchair, Abuela still wants to be useful and help around the house. And in the three years she's lived with my family, the dishes have consistently been her "job."

Maneuvering the wheelchair into position was tricky. But with me standing at the sink and Abuela's chair angled between the sink and the dishwasher, we came up with a partnership system that worked pretty well. I rinsed the dishes and silverware, then handed each item to Abuela so that she could find a place for it on the racks of the machine. It took some time, but we eventually filled the dishwasher and started the cycle. Then I tackled some of the bigger items - pans and serving bowls, or the rubber spatulas and wooden spoons that we usually wash by hand. Abuela meticulously dried each dish, a towel on her lap to catch the drips. Then as I put away the dried dishes and wiped down the sink and countertops, Abuela carefully hung her dishtowels over the edge of the sink to dry, her practiced fingers smoothing out every bump and wrinkle.

Even though multiple strokes and dementia have eaten away at my sweet grandmother's short-term memory, there are some things she will never forget. Washing dishes must be one of those things, like riding a bicycle or tying your shoes. Gertrude Elizabeth Dudte, my grandmother, was raised on a farm in Newton, Kansas. Washing dishes was something she probably did from the time she could stand on a chair or a stool and help her mother and sisters in the kitchen. She's been washing dishes for about ninety years!

Recently our family doctor asked Abuela, "So, are you still doing the dishes and folding the laundry?" Abuela seemed surprised at the question. "Of course," she answered, as if he had been asked her if she's still eating three meals a day. "It's my job."

A Woman's Work is Never Done

Sticking with one task and finishing it completely is nearly impossible for me to do. I feel like I'm just easily distracted. But my mom tells me that I have great "mom sense" - that built-in alertness to the needs of people around me, that compulsive need to pick something up someone has dropped and put it away (even when clothes fall off their hangers in large department stores), that ability to do several things at once, which is God's way of preparing me for motherhood one day.

Today after lunch I wanted to wipe the crumbs and spills off the table. I went to the kitchen to get a damp cloth, but there were no clean cloths in the drawer. So I decided to check in the laundry room, where I saw that the load of clothes I had washed earlier this morning was done. Since it's a sunny day, I wanted to hang them outside on the clothesline to dry, but there was no available laundry basket to carry them in. So I searched the house for a laundry basket, putting away the salad dressing and salt and pepper shakers from lunch and hanging up a stray sweater as I went.

The missing laundry basket was upstairs, but it was full of clean, folded clothes. As I put away the clothes, I found an unopened letter addressed to me from my insurance company, which I set on my desk to read later. Then I took the empty laundry basket downstairs, filled it with the wet clothes, and took them outside to hang on the line. I had to first take down and bring in the dry clothes from a previous load, then hang up the next batch.

When that was finished I decided to wash the rest of the dirty clothes in the laundry room, treating a stain on one of my shirts as I loaded the washer. There weren't quite enough clothes to fill the machine, so I thought I'd go check my room to see if there were any stray items I could add.

As I passed through the kitchen on my way upstairs again, I noticed the crumbs on the table from lunch. Almost an hour after I started, I still hadn't cleared the table, which is what I had set out to do in the first place!