Take It With a Grain of Salt

This is going to have to be a short post. You see I have every single pot, pan, fork, knife, spoon, plate, bowl, cup and glass that I own waiting to be hand-washed in the kitchen. In fact, you can hardly get into the kitchen at the moment. It looks as if my cupboards exploded.

Why this mess? Well, it all started with the water running out. My house isn't hooked up to the city for water because we live "out in the countryside." Only in Italy could where I live be considered "out in the countryside," it's only a 5 minute jog into town and there are other housing developments nearby. But there's no arguing with Italian logic, as illogical as it may be, so we are officially off the grid.

This means that we have a cistern and have to call a water truck to come fill it when it's empty. Which usually happens all of a sudden, when you are least expecting it, right when the water truck guy has a thousand other off-the-grid cisterns to fill so he can't possibly get to you before the next day. 

This happened to us a couple of days ago, in a rather dramatic way. One minute there was water, and the next minute there was not. I, of course, never remember the magic combination of levers I'm supposed to lift, turn and rotate to switch over to the emergency water tank . . . so I did it wrong . . . and sent all our precious water reserves down into the cistern instead of up into the house. Now there was water in the cistern, but not enough for the pump to grab onto it and pump it into the house. Oops.

My husband then had a bright idea. We could add some of the salt water we get from a well in the yard to the cistern to raise the water level until the water truck could come. Great! He got that going and then told both my older son and me, "be sure to turn off the water by 3." Of course, no problem, you can count on us!

At about 4:15 my son and I looked at each other and said, "The water! Did you turn it off? I didn't turn it off. Me neither!" Let's just say that, even with the addition of the load of fresh water from the truck the next day, our water is REALLY salty now. Double oops.

And so, since it was pretty much all my fault, I guess it's only fair that the dishwasher does not seem to like saltwater. I have run it twice, but to no avail. It doesn't just leave everything covered with a salty, white film. The dishes don't even get saltily clean. It's like they're just as dirty as they were before I ran the load, with the lovely addition of a white, salty film on top. Very nice.

           

“The cure for anything is salt water - sweat, tears, or the sea,” according to Isak Dinesen. So, for the next month, or until we use up enough of this salty water to make space in the cistern for another diluting load of fresh water, I'll be living the salt cure and crying and sweating over the sink while washing all the dishes by hand . . . in salty water. Uh huh.

You should try brushing your teeth with it . . .