It was in my grandma’s kitchen that I first fell in love with dishtowels. They gave me purpose in a circle of women for whom purpose was most important.

After holiday dinners, as the men sidled off to the living room to play pinochle at folding card tables, we females took to the kitchen to clean up. The eldest among us washed. The middle-aged women dried. The girls—my cousin and I—shuffled our feet and looked at our hands until, finally, someone asked us to help carry dishes back to the pantry. Just two plates at a time, please.

One day, though, my grandma handed my cousin and me clean, dry dishtowels. She was handing us her trust. We stepped into maturity drying my grandma’s best china.

I do not exactly remember my grandma’s dishtowels, but I am sure they did not feature appliqués of cherries or poodles. They were not brightly striped in purples and mauves. She was practical and of modest means, from “the old country.” I suspect they were muslin, probably made from old flour sacks.

Fifty years later, I keep in my own dishtowel drawer several towels much like those that my mother stitched for me from flour sacks that we discovered in a dead relative’s basement, neatly pressed and stacked and forgotten in a cupboard.

Now they are on active duty. But I am sentimental about them, so I choose them only for clean jobs—drying wine glasses, for example, after a dinner party at our house.

Other dishtowels do the dirty work. In the spring, that includes patting morels dry. In the summer, dishtowels wring the moisture from shredded zucchini or cooked spinach.  In the early fall, the tomato harvest is washed in the sink and then arranged on a blue or green towel to dry. In the winter, I rub toasted hazelnuts with a towel to swiftly remove their stubborn skins. Or I cup a steaming chunk of butternut squash on a towel-lined palm while scooping out the sweet flesh with a spoon.

And bread, when I dare it, always rises beneath a clean dishtowel.

I know someone who keeps no dishtowels but wipes her hands and everything else with paper towels. This is sacrilege. Cooking needs cloth—cloth that you can drape over your shoulder or tuck into your waistband for readiness.

In my dishtowel drawer, which is right opposite my sink, I keep 45 dishtowels. That means there are plenty more if too many get damp or dirty at once. One friend who comes often for dinner likes to lay out almost a dozen towels on our butcher block counter before she hand washes and dries each dish and glass and pot.

When a towel is almost ready for the laundry, I also use it to wipe down my beloved patch of granite countertop, sprayed first with Windex. Voila—shine! And when any towel gets so badly stained that it makes me sad, into the rag box it goes.

I have standards for dishtowels. They must be 100 percent cotton. None of this modern microfiber. A good dishtowel will dry a glass without leaving any specks of water on it. A good dishtowel also has a loop on one edge or corner, so you can hang it from a hook. My favorite dishtowels are not gaudy. Simple plaids or stripes are best. No appliqués, no words. A good towel is at least 16 by 24 inches. (Exception: The smaller tarp-blue shop rags a contractor left behind—beautiful!) A good towel ages well, growing softer with each washing, its edges never rolling. And dishtowels must be cheery. A certain relative’s towels are all black and beige, which makes doing her dishes a gloomy chore.

An objective observer would say, I suppose, that I am a collector of dishtowels. Everywhere I travel I seek them out, although the pickings these days in  this country have become predictable. But not long ago I bought one, for $7, that was handmade on a loom in Berea, Kentucky. I should have bought two.

Two dishtowels, in autumn colors, were gifts from my old friend Marty, whom I rarely see. I think of her every time I use one. A couple of towels were included with a Christmas gift from my brother in Minnesota; I’ve forgotten the gift, but cherish the blue towels, especially the one with the moose on it. A couple of big, square, white cotton ones, so lightweight you can almost see through them, were bought at a Mennonite general store in mid-Michigan. And one bright green-and-white towel is the only one left from a batch I bought 20 years ago to use at our old lakeside cottage, when drying dishes while watching dusk fall on the water was as good as it gets.

I must confess, though, that one of my favorite dishtowels is stolen.

We had leased for a week an apartment in London in a century-old building. It was quaint as could be, with an ample, well-appointed kitchen. It had not a towel drawer but a whole towel cupboard, overflowing with towels both virgin and stained.

I developed a fondness for one unlike any I own. It was deep rose and white, with the image of an urn overflowing with fruit. Its tag read “Made in France.”

I used it every day of that week, and before we left, I tucked it in my suitcase, telling myself the household still had several others like it, that the owner would never miss it.

Now I am contrite. If someone stole it from me, I would be devastated. But then again, anyone who appreciates a beautiful, functional dishtowel is a special soul, and could (I hope) be forgiven.

Do I own too many dishtowels? Can a day have too many kisses, or too much sunshine? Can a person have too many friends?

All I know is this: The holidays and dinner parties that end with a full laundry basket and an almost empty dishtowel drawer are the very best.