The kitchen sink is where basic life support happens - water is drawn, food is prepared, pots and pans are set to soak beans or burned-on rice over night, and where cooking and serving dishes and utensils come clean. It is transformational - a place where things are on their way to becoming something slightly or majorly different than they were in the cupboard, the refrigerator, the grocery bag, the pantry shelf, or on the stove or dinner plate - wetter, cleaner, fatter, soupier, healthier, tastier, skinless, etc....
The kitchen sink is a food processor. As the portal for “the pig,” it is a waste disposal system and sometime a redesigner of the rings and flat-wear it swirls down the drain for the pig to chew on for a few seconds. It is also the place of my greatest profligacy.
When I run water down the drain, wasting it while rinsing glass-wear, or worse, waiting for it to get hot, it usually makes me think of a documentary I saw in which a woman in Africa was laying a cloth on a shallow mud-puddle so she could wash her child’s face and wringing the muddy water into a gourd for drinking or cooking. There I stand at my kitchen sink with my hands in the water and my mind in Somalia, or wondering if the firemen in Texas have enough water to put out all those wildfires. There’s drought in America’s heartland and crops are failing. So my kitchen sink is often a place of heightened social and ecological awareness as well as of gratitude tinged with the guilt of my profligacy.
Water running clean and cold or hot (whichever I choose!) into the kitchen sink is one of the oldest and greatest inventions of mankind. Where would most of the world be without it? Think of Africa...or Appalachia... and be grateful.
Wars are fought over access to water and I use it to wash my car? Not any more. The planetary car wash does just fine.
This category, then, is where you may find all sorts of strange mental meanderings like this piece that are too random to fit another category. You are welcome at my ethereal kitchen sink - may it serve us well.
The Kitchen Sink by Abby Freeborn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Comments may be addressed to randmxcentric@gmail.com
