The Quiet Joy of Doing the Dishes

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The Quiet Joy of Doing the Dishes

Anna Boulogne My Manhattan apartment does not have a dishwasher. We’ve debated installing one; there’s room, just barely. I always pull back at the last minute. I like doing the dishes by hand, the more the merrier, the crustier the better. Sometimes music will be playing. I’ll find myself moved by it, the way the English novelist Barbara Pym was, as she wrote in a 1943 journal entry, when she caught herself weeping to Yehudi Menuhin on the radi…