How to Hand Wash Dishes and other Lost Skills

I grew up washing dishes by hand and developed an expertise in dishwashing. There were no electronic gadgets in my home as a child except for refrigerator powered by tiny gas sacks that had to be pumped up. The fridge made the coolest iced custard. I recall my dad boiling the custard and placing it in ice cube trays. My dad sold the cubes of excess custard to the few children on the Island. I did say “sold” But it was the greatest treat ever and my best memory of the large white appliance that adorned our small home.

I might be dating myself but no I am not that old; we just lived on a small Island in a remote part of a remote country. So the refrigerator was not only a treat it was also a status symbol. While we had a gadget to keep our food cold, everything else was hand done. Our shower came for a barrel of water positioned outside the house and the attached hose did the trick quite nicely. Our drinking water came either from the river and treated with certain tablets my dad carefully placed in the barrels of brown water which we had fetched from the river, or the rainfall.

There was no indoor plumbing, no TV, no computers. We swept the floors with hand tied brooms, brushed our teeth with toothbrushes made with small branches from a tree (can’t recall the name of the tree but it was a special tree) Our entertainment was limited to reading anything and everything, playing hopscotch, skipping and exploring the forest.

This week tragedy struck our home. The dishwasher broke filled with dirty dishes. We had to break the news to our college kids as gently as we could who are home for the summer that they had to wash the dishes by hand. To my surprise, my son soon started on the dishes but seemed a bit overwhelmed. I asked if he knew how to wash dishes and he nodded yes. Then I said, “O, you must have learned at that shops class you took in junior high where you baked those great muffins”. “No”, he responded, “I looked it up Online”

So for those of you who don’t know how to wash dishes by hand and would need to in an emergency, or if your kids tell you that they don’t know how to hand wash dishes, sweep floors with a broom or fetch water from the lake, the secret is out; it is good to know that all you need to do is search for “how to” online and you are in business.