Silvet

In our household I do most but not all of of the dishes. My wife Susan, working hard, cooks and does some dishes. This system has gradually revealed, over 52 years, a difference in how to arrange the clean silverware.

I stack the clean silverware with the heads facing toward me. All the spoons go into one divider; all the forks, in another. When I open the drawer, it’s obvious which group is spoons and which is forks. (The handles of all the silverware are identical.)

Susan prefers to put away the silverware in groups but upside down so that only the handles are visible. That way, when she reaches in the drawer for something to eat with, she can surprise herself.

In the past this has led to extra work for me, in that I had to go through the silverware drawer from time to time and straighten out the forks so that they all pointed in the right direction. That was foolish work, right? It finally occurred to me that if some of the forks in the fork section were visibly forks, it didn’t matter if other forks could be seen only as standard handles. I could still determine where the forks were. Having all the forks facing the same direction was unnecessary. What am I, obsessively neat? Today the fork section is a cheerful jumble, like a typical marriage, with forks pointing any which way, and I have a new aesthetic.