Earth Day Challenge: Day 3.

The dishes. As a child, the dishes were the bane of my existence because of stuff that detached itself from the dishes and floated in the water. And then touched my hand. It was the stuff of nightmares, especially when there were scrambled eggs involved. Gak. This meant I had demands, such as rubber gloves for when I had to immerse my hands into the floatie-filled water. Of course, the first tine of a fork grabbed the wrong way and the gloves would leak--that was its own fresh hell.

With the advent of the dishwasher (cue heavenly choirs), one could avoid almost all direct contact with the food on the plate, with the help of running water, gallons of it. Gallons of running water and a scrubbie thing. Then you could load your practically-clean dishes into the dishwasher for their prophylactic hour in hot water.

Okay, I know the gallons of running water are wrong. I know this. So today, when doing the dishes, I filled two pans with water, squeezed a little soap in, soaked the flatware in that, and then scrubbed them out. I used a little running water, but hardly any. Comparatively speaking, I was collecting rainwater in buckets. That's, of course, compared to the way I used to do the dishes.

[Oh, and here's today's little versification.]