My house. Where difficult silverware goes to die.

When I was growing up, one of my main household duties was the nightly task of washing dishes and cleaning up the kitchen after dinner. God, I hated it.

My mother's silverware drawer was a constant annoyance to me. On one side, our spoons, forks, and knives sat neatly in their little trays. The rest of the drawer was a chaotic mess of other, less frequently used cooking- and eating-related utensils: vegetable peelers, spatulas, corn on the cob holders, and so on. I quickly termed this the "difficult silverware" because these items were hard to organize, often oversized, and seemed to require endless rooting through the drawer to find.

In my adulthood, I have tried to alleviate this problem by having a large ceramic container sitting on the counter that holds and provides easy access to all the larger items. I, too, have a mass of garlic presses, measuring spoons, fondue forks, and shish kebab sticks messily taking up space in the other half of my silverware drawer. But at least I have made some progress on the organization front. My mama didn't raise no dummy.

I have noticed that Ivan has very little interest in my personal system of silverware organization. (The same could be said for his position regarding my systems for washing dishes, arranging the medicine cabinet, cleaning the bathroom sink, and putting away groceries, but I suppose at the moment that is neither here nor there.) We share the task of washing dishes, but in recent weeks and months when I have not felt well he has cheerfully born the brunt of it (unless we played cards and placed bets on who had to wash the dishes and I lost--also neither here nor there).

Ivan's kryptonite is putting the clean dishes away. He hates it. He is brought to his knees. He will beg and plead and cajole me that he will wash the dishes if only I will put the clean dishes away. Some days this sounds like a reasonable request. Other days it does not. If left to his own devices, he will put away simple items like plates and bowls and cups. The rest he stacks randomly around the kitchen or else takes a wild guess as to where it might belong and stashes it there. On some level I find this amusing, but when I am in the middle of cooking and politely looking for an item ("Where in the hell is the mixing bowl?") it makes me crazy.

This is how the ladle and the whisk have disappeared.

Really, it could be so easy! They could be proudly sitting in the container on the counter, ready to be called to duty again. Instead, I root through drawers and cabinets complaining, "How far could the goddamned whisk have gotten?"

To which he replies, "Which one is the whisk again?"

They have both been missing for weeks, and to his annoyance I never miss an educational opportunity to remind him of their usefulness and to bemoan their unknown whereabouts whenever I can.

I think about them sometimes even when I am not cooking. I like to imagine they are now free from servitude and pursuing other, non-functional interests and talents they might have. I suppose they will turn up eventually. Maybe when I move out of this apartment. Or, sure as shit, as soon as I decide to replace them and buy new ones.




I call this one "Sans Ladle and Whisk."