Kitchen towels tell a tale or two

 Cotton Kitchen Towel A bridal shower is the only time in a woman's life when she will sincerely squeal with delight at something as mundane as a dish towel. It's all downhill from there. I've often said you can tell what stage of homemaking a woman is in by looking at her kitchen towels.I pulled a load of clothes from our married daughter's dryer and found the cutest all-cotton dish towels embroidered with the days of the week. Monday, Tuesday and Thursday were wrinkled beyond the help of even Botox. Saturday was crumpled in a ball like a used Kleenex, and Wednesday, Friday and Sunday looked like they'd been extracted from a 1960s time capsule."What do you do with these?" I asked."I iron them," she deadpanned.She does. She mists them, irons them, creases them, puts them in order and lays them in a kitchen drawer.But then, her measuring spoons still nestle, her measuring cups still stack, and not a single plastic spatula has a melted edge resembling the coastline of Florida. What a newlywed.The woman whose kitchen drawer is crammed full of flour sack and terry knit kitchen towels folded at odd angles is a woman who has been at the game for awhile.If the towels are stained with coffee, spaghetti sauce and mustard, she is probably a woman with children. You are looking at the disheveled drawer of a busy woman who provides good nutrition for her family.When you find a woman with kids, whose kitchen towel drawer is neat and tidy, filled with spotless, perfectly folded organic cotton towels in a rainbow of the latest citrus colors, you can know one thing with certainty: The family eats out a lot.The homemaker whose kitchen towel drawer has an eclectic mix of blue towels faded to gray and red towels faded to pink -- and half of them are so threadbare it's a tossup whether they belong in the kitchen drawer or the rag bag -- is a woman approaching her 20th anniversary. With the cost of shoes, braces, doctor visits and a full tank of gas, new kitchen towels feel like an unnecessary indulgence.Somebody, please, give that woman a kitchen shower.The drawer with dish towels featuring pictures of barnyard animals, woodland creatures, autumn leaves, cheery snowmen, Valentine hearts and an oven mitt that looks like a largemouth bass is a drawer belonging to a schoolteacher or a grandma. Hey, you're hard to buy for.We women have a mysterious relationship with the towels of our lives.Our towels change as we change. Our towels age as we age.My mom had two kitchen towels hanging from a knickknack shelf in her kitchen that are still there today. They are starched white cotton with black needlework. The one on the left says, "Martha Stewart Doesn't Live Here." The one on the right says, "Inside Every Old Person is a Young Person Wondering What Happened."