Washing Dishes By Candlelight
Our power is out and I’m washing dishes by hand. It’s true what they say—that when one sense is diminished, the others rise to compensate. I hear the drip drip drip of running water, but in the dim light I cannot make out individual water droplets. Instead, I reach my hand under the faucet and it comes back dry. The sound must be coming from elsewhere.
There’s a strange sense of serenity that comes with having less stimuli. As many glasses-wearers may inform you, sometimes it's nice to simply take them off and let the world blur. (If you are a fellow glasses-wearer and haven’t experienced this—try it. Look up at a tree and let the leaves blur into a singular mass, or look down at your hands and watch the texture fade from view). Of course, I’m grateful to have my sight and I’m grateful to exist in a position of privilege where glasses can correct my otherwise blurred perspective. Still, there’s something about navigating by candlelight—the world cast in a warmer, wavering, orange color as opposed to the traditional, bright, artificial white light—that feels a little magical.
Image Courtesy: Delaney Gunnell
This feeling takes me back in time. People with the same privileges that I currently have are used to consistent light and a dishwasher, but this wasn’t always the case. Presently, while doing this repetitive task of washing dishes, I let my mind wander to my paternal grandmother and great-grandmother who grew up in rural Kentucky. While they had all the privileges of being white in America, their lives as “women of the house” were not without strife. In the south, a woman’s cooking is a part of her legacy and is a skill passed down from generation to generation.
Even now as I picture my grandmother, I can most readily imagine her standing in a kitchen, scribbling homemade recipes on index cards. Those index cards will soon be placed in a familiar box, her lifetime of labor reduced to small pieces of paper sorted by meal. These recipes are like a famous cookbook in my family and at some point, before I was born, my mother was gifted one of these small boxes for her own.
Image Courtesy: Courier Journal
On my mother’s side of the family, this gendered labor division continues to persist. I can still draw upon my muted outrage from earlier this year when one of my Masas came over for dinner and simply sat down at the table—expecting fully to have the food prepared and served to him. Traditional Indian dishes take longer to prepare than their Western counterparts, and when the burden of preparation falls solely on women, its easy to imagine feeling trapped in the kitchen, unable to choose how to spend the hours.
In contrast to the patriarchal standards back then, today in America, many women have the luxury of planning household tasks around their busy lives outside of the house. Of course, it was (and still is) harder for women to get a thorough education and stand up against injustice. Not only were the barriers of entry so high then, but many women simply didn’t have the spare time to allot to school or work. Here I am now with so many privileges: the feeling of strong running water washing over my hands, the scent of good-quality soap—and still, I feel subdued by a temporary darkness.
Image Courtesy: Gender & Society
It’s easy to take domestic tasks for granted when they’re mindless choices. If we need to eat, we wash the dishes. If we’re out of clean clothes, we do the laundry. For most of us, this is only one small part of our colorful and complex lives. It’s hard to slow down and think about the household task at hand and harder yet to think of those before us for whom this task may have seemed enormous.
With all this in mind, the next time you’re washing the dishes, or cleaning the apartment, or doing the laundry, think of all the generations of women before you who labored to make your life possible.
Strike Out,
Writer: Delaney Gunnell
Copy Editor: Emma Twilley
Content Editor: Melissa Donovan
Orlando
Delaney Gunnell is a content writer for Strike Magazine Orlando. Besides writing, she likes photography, chocolate, reading rom-coms, and sitting in the sunshine. She likes listening to music that makes her laugh and watching TV shows that make her cry. You can reach her at gunnelldelaney@gmail.com or @delaney_g__ on Instagram.