Sink Wife

The only part of my house that is clean right now is the kitchen sink.  Hair-and-lint balls are piling up in the corners and behind doors, bike tire trails from the front door to the kitchen crisscross wet-leaf trails from the back door, and the microscopic life forms of the bathroom are reaching visible colony sizes.  But the stainless steel kitchen sink, the place where all the greens get double washed, is spotless, shiny even, the well-maintained hub of the household.

Which is no surprise given that, lately, I feel like I live at that sink, constantly standing over it as I cut and tear leaves from their stems, bathe greens in a sink full of water, and move greens from the water to the strainer then back to a fresh bath of water then finally to the spinner for drying.  Or I'm washing the bulky dishes, like salad-mixing bowls and food processor parts, that inevitably follow salad making or greens cooking.  Basically, in these cloudy days of early spring, I'm feeling like a sink wife, a woman whose sink-related chores are never-ending and largely unseen, without which the steady gallop of greens consumption, so necessary if we're going to make this leap from fall to spring garden in about a month, would come to a standstill.  Forward progress is at stake here.

It amazes me how tedious forward progress, lived at the daily level, really is.  For instance, I want to grow some of my own produce in my own yard.  Which is a lovely goal, and one that is very clear in its idea phase – I want to grow greens! – and at fruition – This spinach salad is so delicious!  Even most of the obvious in-between steps, like selecting the seeds, planting the seeds, thinning the seedlings, and weeding the garden, are things that I look forward to doing, side effects from the original produce-growing goal that really are part of the reason that I want to be growing greens in the first place, because I like spending time in the garden.  But then the repetitive tasks sneak in, like processing the greens.

Greens – lettuces, spinach, chard, beet greens, Asian greens, mustard, kale, etc – are dirty.  Not dirty in a gross or bad way, but literally dirty: coated in garden soil, which is splashed on their leaves every time it rains, carrying pieces of mulch, and host to caterpillars, beetles, and aphids.  And, while baby greens are edible as whole leaves, mature greens have large leaves that need to be torn or cut into smaller pieces and from which the woody, central veins need to be removed.  This is the work of the sink wife, taking a bucketful of muddy, nearing-shrub-size plants and transforming them into a bowlful of greens that are ready to be cooked or coated in salad dressing.  Cut, toss stem in compost, tear, toss greens in sink.  Repeat about 137 times.  Slosh greens in water to loosen dirt, transfer to strainer, drain and clean the sink, and repeat.  Repeat.  To repeat is the tedious part of the growing-produce goal, and it is in the midst of the repeat, as I stare out the kitchen window and shift my weight from one leg to the other, that the emotions of the sink wife arise.  The feelings of being trapped in a never-ending process, the sense of being unappreciated for all this effort, and the fear that the work that I am doing is not valuable.

Valuable to whom?  This is a problem that I have, a problem common to many women and a few caretaker men, having been raised by mothers who told us that we could do anything that we wanted while showing us how to silently anticipate the needs of everybody around us.  As their mothers did before them.  I want my work, my time, to be valuable to somebody else, and I have trouble spending my time in ways that are simply valuable to me.  Still, I don't think that the fears of the sink wife are just about value.  I think they run deeper.

To the issue that has been all consuming for me lately: time.  How I spend my time.  The sink wife is the part of me that fears that I am wasting my time standing over the sink, stripping cilantro leaves from their stems to make pesto, or tearing apart lettuce and spinach leaves to make a salad mix, or cutting thick veins from huge mustard leaves to cook into a curry.  The sink wife is the part of me that fears that the whole process, the whole growing-greens project that I have chosen to do, is a waste of time.  That I have made the wrong choice.  That I am doing the wrong thing.

The sink wife arises in the midst of the tedious, repetitive work because that is where I am least distracted by doing.  When I'm in the garden, I'm enjoying being outside too much to question it, and by the time that I am cooking, I'm either busy chopping onions or I'm close enough to the finish that I can see, or smell, the upcoming meal.  But in the midst of the slow, repetitive detail work, the fears beneath, that I am not doing it right, that I am making the wrong choices, they come bubbling up through the sink full of leaves to greet the silence.  I have time to think and wonder and question, so here come the questions:  Am I doing the right thing?  Am I doing it right, this life?

A better question to ask might be, How am I doing it?  Am I enjoying this quiet time in front of the sink, surrounded by the abundance of greens that I have grown, separating leaves from stems into a spotless sink while listening to Maná and daydreaming, or am I worrying about whether I am doing the right thing?

Whole Lotta Greens

Time or money? is the oldest question of all.  Ever since we as a species figured out how to domesticate the plants and animals that feed us, we've had to decide whether to spend our time producing what we need or to exchange our time for money so that we can buy what we need.  In the twenty-first century, in the developed world, we exchange our time for money for all the things that we need.  Even among the farmers, few are able to choose the other way, to choose time over money.

Yet, I want to choose time, or at least I want to feel like I have the option to choose time.  I don't like feeling like an indentured servant to the industrial-consumption machine.  I think that one of my motivations to garden, to grow my own food, is to practice choosing time.  The reality of it is not as simple as that, given that growing a garden also costs money.  But in spirit, if not in practice, growing a garden is a commitment of time.  I commit to preparing the garden, to planting the garden, and to caring for the garden, and the garden produces food that I can carry straight into the kitchen without paying a grocer, or distributor, or wholesaler, or farmer.  I get food in exchange for my time.

Food costs more that just time in the growing of it.  Cooking from scratch, using raw ingredients out of the garden, also takes time.  Time that I am accustomed to spending, in fact, often happy to spend.  But then there is the time required to get the food from the garden to the kitchen counter, ready to be sliced or dressed or sautéed or baked.  That is where I am finding myself spending a lot of time lately, as I thin and trim and wash the greens from my garden.

The greens in my front yard garden grew more quickly than I expected, with each row turning into a crowded hedge of baby plants desperately in need of thinning.  At first I put off thinning because the garden looked so good.  I loved the look of the fat, crowded rows of greens across the yard, and I didn't want to lose that fullness through thinning.  Once I began, the thinning process was slow going.  The stems of the over-sized baby greens were tightly packed together, so that the leaves were intertwined and stuck to each other as I tried to remove some, but not all, of the plants.  Each row required careful, patient time, and produced a huge bowl of greens.  The thinning process, which was originally a simple, single item on my to-do list, "thin greens and make salads," has turned into a weeks-long process.

Once the greens were harvested, the next step was to trim the leaves from the stems, or the stems from the roots, depending on the type of greens.  I discarded yellowed or brown leaves into the compost bowl along with the stems and roots and tossed the healthy leaves into the sink for washing.

Growing crowded and close to the ground, some of the leaves were quite muddy when they went into the sink.  Luckily the dirt dropped to the bottom of the sink as I sloshed the greens around in the cool water.  I pulled the greens out of the water into a colander, rinsed the dirt out of the sink, and refilled the sink with water.  Then I dropped the greens back into the sink for a second rinse, just to make sure all of the dirt was washed away.  After the second rinse, I dried the greens in a salad spinner.  Now the greens were ready for cooking, or salad making, or to be stored in the refrigerator for later use.

Sunday I spent a few hours trimming and washing cilantro and parsley thinnings, bok choy thinnings, and tatsoi thinnings.  As I stood in front of the kitchen sink, clipping and sloshing, I was painfully aware of time passing and of all the other things that I could have been doing with that time, including writing a blog entry.  The expensive boxes of washed, organic greens at the grocery store started seeming a lot less expensive, given the labor and oil involved in their production.  But, in the end, once I saw the volume of greens that I had washed and readied for eating, I was reminded that having too many greens is a good problem.  We will eat well this week.

Of course, the final, and most important, step of the process was the supervisor inspection.  Benji sniffed each bowl but took a special interest in the cilantro and parsley.  I've read that cats eat plants to cleanse their intestines, and I've also read that parsley is a cleansing herb.  So it should have been no surprise when she decided to eat a fresh, baby sprig of parsley.  At which point her inspection was rudely interrupted as I hauled her screaming self off the dining-room table.  I guess that, even if I was weary from time spent thinning, and trimming, and washing, baby greens, Benji was there with her excellent feline nose to remind me that fresh greens from the garden have a quality that can't be bought in a plastic box from across the country.