I was scrubbing two white hand towels at the kitchen sink. These two gems were cut from an old bath towel. Months ago, I sewed bright blue embroidery thread using blanket stitch around them. Their purpose is to provide me with something to dry my hands on. Something that feels nice and thick. It is a pity they are white.
Actually, it is a good thing they are white, for it is easy to see where I have wiped my hands before, so that I can avoid that spot the next time. I have got it down to a fine art: when the towel is clean, I start near the top of the towel (next to that nifty little loop I sewed in at the one corner by which it hangs on the hook), and successive bouts of drying work their way down to the bottom of the towel.
Too much information, and all very gross, perhaps. But I discovered by accident today that an old bread board of mine is the perfect utensil to balance in my too-small sink upon which to scrub these and other kitchen towels. I went at it with as much gusto as I could manage after waking up in a cloud of ennui about as appealing as diesel exhaust smoke in one’s face on a bright summer’s morning just after a shower.
I could not shake the melancholy mood, and so frittered away the hours, despite having carte blanche today. No deadlines! I could have made an attempt at finishing that short story, updating my list of non-fiction works translated, or neatening up admin schedules, but instead daydreamed until my leaden self decided the best thing was to waste a few more hours trying to sort out my Wi-Fi printer. Just the thing to galvanise a foul mood.
Luckily, I was rescued from that idiotic exploit in the late afternoon by a content-heavy webinar on the delightful subject of "AI and Literary Translation: A struggle for copyright", an event jointly arranged by CEATL and FIT. Normally, after such webinars I voraciously plough through reference material given in the course of presentations. But not today.
Today, I decided to scrub those white towels using the newly discovered breadboard technique. In the middle of doing the second one, I uttered aloud to my dog, “L’Enfer, c’est les autres”. God (assuming she still exists) only knows where that came from. If you want to twist yourself into a pretzel, read this short essay, which gives a brief interpretation which almost had me convinced that Sartre was English.
The taps at my kitchen sink need replacing, because the cold water one does not work; it merely dribbles. This means that the available spurt of water is normally somewhere between 55 and 60 degrees Celsius — effing hot, in other words.
As I rinsed the towels, something about the smell of the residual soap, the hot water, and even the action of it reminded me of my mother, with whom I spent many an early morning chatting while she toiled away at her twin-tub with the family laundry. She would quite often say (not only to me), “Don’t be such a misery guts”. She did a lot of scrubbing, too.
Redemption through Sartre and my mother. Who would ever have thought that?
©2025 Allison Wright
I gobbled this one up. Who knew kitchen towels could be so entertaining!