Add A Smile

June 29,2022

Add a smile and give your cheeks some exercise. Add a smile and you will start having fun doing whatever you are doing. As I wash a dish or two, I smile. I remember what fun I had had washing dishes when I was little. Sometimes my grandmother would have let me wash the dishes after we had all eaten breakfast, when we had been on vacation in Ohio. I had had to stand on a stool to reach. I had just loved rubbing the wet soapy cloth over a plate or pushing it down into a glass. I had loved the bubbles, I had made using the soap shaker filled with shrunken cakes of used soap, as they had been swimming around on the surface of the pool of water in the washing side of her sink. When the dishes were shiny and draining, I had cleaned the sink as I laughed. My grandmother had let me use the squirter to get all the suds down the drain. I had been so happy when I was playing in the water holding bubbles in my hands and washing the dishes, sometimes at my grandmother’s house. After everything had been done, she would have lifted me off of my stool and then picking me up would have given me a big hug and a kiss. She would have put me down again, and she would have said, “Now go and play.” I had been confused. What had I been doing? I thought I had been playing house. Then I had run off giggling as little girls are wont to do. I grew up and I still do some dishes that are not in the dishwasher, and I smile because I remember. I still squirt water around the sink after I have cleaned it, perhaps taking a little extra time just because it is still fun. If you add a smile to your face, you will find everything you do is more fun. When did adults forget? When did adults become so serious? What came first, being happy or the smiling? I am not totally sure, because I am for the most part pretty much always happy, but sometimes when I am deep in thought, I think to smile. Then I again remember the happiness I had had doing what I am doing when I had been doing it then. Let us remember, so we do not forget and let ourselves become too serious. Oh, one more thing, I am remembering how I had loved doing the wash with the wringer washing machine with the agitating spinning middle. What fun it had been to squeeze everything through the wringer and watch it drop into one set tub, then into the other after a second wringing and finally into my outstretched hands before I had dropped the clean wash into the woven clothesbasket near my feet. Hanging the laundry on the clothesline to dry using wooden clothes pins at my grandmother’s house when I was little had also been great fun. My face just smiled again. Try smiling yourself. It is like eating peanuts, once you start, you just can’t stop. Be happy and have a most marvelous day.

Granny-o