Dish Towels and Dish Rags

These cloths sitting on my washing machine probably don't look like anything valuable.

But they are.

In 2013, I wrote a story for The Herald-News in Joliet about a Joliet author, Thomas Meisinger (a later a guest blogger for the BryonySeries, too), who had memorialized the close relationship he had with his grandmother in this book.

I don't remember her full name. I only remember her as Grandma Margie.

I met Grandma Margie just twice. The first time was at a restaurant on Eastern Orthodox Holy Saturday, when we were super busy cooking Easter foods, the busiest day of our whole year, because the author really wanted me to come out and meet her, because she had really loved The Herald-News story I had written about her.

The second was a year later. I was just hired as features editor at The Herald-News (I had previously freelanced for The Herald-News for about fifteeen years), and Grandma Margie came in one day with a box of dish towels she had embroidered for me.

She had no idea how poor we were at the time. We had either just moved out of my parents home into a two bedroom apartment at The Birches in Joliet or we were in the process of looking for apartments - I can't remember which..

Either way, Grandma Margie's dish towels were the only dish towels we owned for a very long time. 

Now, backing up a few years, when we delivered thousands of newspapers in the middle of the night, an elderly customer made us some dish rags. 

Her house was quite away from Route 6, and she could not get to her newspaper tube to get the newspaper, especially once it snowed. Many times, our van could not make it to her porch either. 

So I would park on Route 6, and one of the kids would tromp through deep snow all the way to her porch.

One day, in gratitude, she gave us a set of dish cloths she had crocheted for us. We still have two (the others have since fallen apart with many, many, many washings of dishes).

Both women have since passed away, Grandma Margie, just recently.

But we always thought of them, and still do, every time we picked up one of these cloths, cloths that we still use in our home. 

Some day, even the towels will be a memory. So, for now, we treasure them.