Whose turn is it to do the dishes?

Photograph of a misty valley in Athens County


As we know, Dad was a storyteller from a long line of storytellers. The one Peck story my friends beg for over and over again happened when my dad was in his late teens, having been forced to drop out of school and go into the mines with my grandad after he and my grandma Simpkins divorced.

Dad said that he and his dad got up while it was still dark, packed their "buckets" and headed to the mine. When they were finished working at the end of a long day underground, it was still dark, and they were tired and hungry.

With no woman around to take care of the home front, the kitchen situation deteriorated until one evening when Dad couldn't find any clean dishes and asked my famously plain-spoken and often combative grandad what they should do about the piles of dirty dishes.

"Don't you worry about the dishes," Grandad said. "I'll take care of them." Whereupon he gathered them up in a tin dishpan, walked out the door and threw them over the side of the hill.

Now, James Jeremiah Simpkins, my dad's dad, was not a patient man, but, tell me, who hasn't felt like doing the same thing?