There’s a lamp over the kitchen sink and lighting it, I notice the morning's breakfast plates, crusted with egg yolk and bacon grease, piled with the rest of the day's dishes. The last meal I cooked for you. Without thinking, the familiar routine takes over – stack sticky plates and murky glasses on the sideboard, carry the steaming kettle from stove to sink. Fill the pan, whisk the wire soap-saver with its bits and ends of yellow soap through the scalding water, watch the pan fill with suds. Set the plates and glasses to soak, then the silverware. Already the mess on the counter and sink looks better, and I feel calmer than I have all evening.

 Thirty years ago four friends – Dinnie Aldridge, Barbara Hatch, Margitte Malmstrom, and I – gathered every couple of weeks around one or another of our tables and shared what we’d written. Each of us was working on a writing project, and we’d come together to help each other learn the craft. We read aloud our latest efforts, then critiqued – ever so gently – each others work.

 One time we assigned ourselves a single topic: Washing the Dishes. Digging around this morning I found my piece lying forgotten in the basement of my hard drive. Though the only times I’ve washed dishes with a steaming kettle of water carried from the woodstove is when the power is out on a frigid day or maybe while camping, the same calmness takes over every time I tackle a sinkful of dirty dishes.

 Just as it did this morning.

 I’ve always said that the first thing a new owner of this house would do is tear out the kitchen. But I bet they’d keep the sink. It’s a mammoth slate sink, complete with built in soap dish, nothing fancy, no carving or elaborate fittings, just a plain, utilitarian black slate sink. We found it with an ad we placed in the Courier-Gazette many, many years ago: “Wanted: slate sink.” The very day it ran we got a call: “We’ve got one you can have; would $10 be okay?”

 The old couple selling it lived in a small house in Rockland’s south end; it was down cellar the woman told us. We glanced at her husband, sitting in the front room, then uneasily at each other. The fellow had no legs.

“My wife’s very strong,” he assured us, “she’ll help you get it out.”

Maybe she was very strong, but I wasn’t sure I was.

 But we followed her down the steep stairs/ladder that led to the cellar and there it was. Three feet long with an 18-inch tall back splash. The thing must weigh a ton, we thought. Wally took one end, and we two women took the other, though the wife, easily 40 years older than me, picked up the backsplash corner, giving me the lightest part.

 Somehow we got it back up those stairs, and after a cheery farewell from the husband we got it out the door and into the truck. Back home it sat on the kitchen floor for several years while we figured out how to install it.

I can’t remember now who was working here on what part of our ever-needy house, but one day whoever he was took out the original sink, propped up the slate one on a 2 x 4 framework, and had it hooked up and working in an hour.

 A kitchen sink the size of a small bathtub comes in handy. Bathing a baby, for instance. I treasure the photo of a 9-year old niece soaping up her plump 8-month old cousin, our third born, in that sink. It holds as many as 10 naked chickens, chilling in a cold-water bath before being popped into the freezer, a sight that freaked out a rug customer passing through the kitchen on her way to use our bathroom, I’m sure the only reason she stopped to “look at our rugs.”

 A two-gallon milk bucket and all the parts of a cream separator fit handily into that sink, as did the two five-gallon plastic pails Wally filled with water every winter morning for our cow and various livestock. The huge canning kettle with its rack for 9 quarts can be filled from the faucet with room to spare. It also easily holds a few days worth of dishes from a single woman or those from one night’s dinner party.

One prerequisite of a kitchen sink has to be the sink window, that and its sill that holds the tchotchkes every woman collects. My current collection includes a broken shell, a baby African violet started from a leaf the way my mother always did it, a large star cookie cutter, my pill glass, and a see-no-evil monkey.

My friend’s sink window sill still displays its “Grandma’s kitchen” sign and the lovely bright white lace curtain she hung there.

 But the window’s more important than its knick knacks.

For the dish washing person, be it man or woman, the view the window frames is one constant in his/her life. Even if dish washing includes a machine to do the actual washing, there’s still a great deal of scrubbing and rinsing that goes on in that sink. And a great deal of gazing at the view out the window.

 Since my kitchen doesn’t have one of those machines, guests who volunteer to wash my dishes are on their own. Everybody has to figure out the best way to do it.

One friend, suffering from painful arthritis, loved washing dishes at my house as the hot water made her hands feel so good. Another, a niece, always invokes her Irish great-grandmother, Bridget Ryan, who arrived in Augusta from her native land to become a domestic; the re-incarnated Bridget is the scullery maid who promises to “do the dishes in the morning.” Sometimes she does!

 Back to the calming effect of washing the dishes. Anything we do with our hands, especially if its repetitive, has a way of soothing us. Anxiety, which is the result of letting the same troubling thoughts run round and round, over and over through our minds, is short-circuited by those busy hands. If we can concentrate on the soapy water, the dish rag, the way the glass sparkles when we rinse it there’s no room for anxious thoughts.

 It sounds so simple, doesn’t it? Maybe that’s why it works.

The Knitting & Needlework gang are taking advantage of a free Tuesday and are planning to gather for an extra night together.  They will meet at the library Tuesday the 21st, from 4 until 6.  Newcomers and summer visitors are always warmly welcomed.

 The Writing Group will meet Friday at 9 a.m. to review their individual writing projects and to discuss the craft of writing.  Newcomers are welcomed to join this group that meets with Sheila every second and fourth Friday.

 The Library is open (and air-conditioned!) Tuesdays 4-7, Wednesdays 2-7, and Fridays & Saturdays 9-noon. And by the way, that air conditioning is thanks to the heat pump which is powered by the solar panels on the roof of the building.

One sign that the days are drawing close to September and the start of school comes in the mail. Two of my grandchildren have already received letters from their new teachers welcoming them to the next grade.

 Meanwhile, Bill, my teacher son, has already begun his school year, teaching math to middle and high schoolers at the Bali Green School. Bali. As in Indonesia. The buildings are all made of bamboo, and he teaches barefoot.