Interior designers and architects have identified the fireplace hearth as the heart of the home. They are, of course, wrong. The heart of the home is the kitchen sink.

More than any spot in the house, the kitchen sink is where truth is told, lessons are taught and feelings expressed. If you want to watch a true reality show, give two people a pile of dirty dishes, warm sudsy water and a dish towel and then just stand back and watch and listen.

Of course there is only one true kind of kitchen sink. It is white and porcelain. Of sure, today the designers give us fancy, shmancy sinks, stainless with sleek and curvy faucets, under mount sinks all surrounded by granite and instant hot this and squirt me out that gimmicks. These are sinks to behold, not to use. Everything one needs at a kitchen sink is out of place in the designers' world. There's no room for the yellow bottle of Joy, the frayed bit of pot scrubber, or the communal family drinking cup in the designer set up. But all those practical supplies are right at home on the old, white porcelain sink. And the best sink of all is that ancient one-piece wall hanging model with the high back and the drain board. Why you could leave your bar of soap at that sink and hang your dishtowel on the faucet and it all looked like it belonged.

Dirty dishes and dirty hands and dirty secrets, they are all welcome at the practical and forgiving white porcelain kitchen sink.

Today's kitchen designers want us all to pretend dirty hands and dirty dishes aren't the norm and so all such unpleasantries must be hidden away. In the real world the kitchen sink is in constant use for cleaning, quenching thirst, rinsing, washing. The dirty become clean, the parched become refreshed, meals are prepared, flowers are watered, it all happens here.

As wonderful as the dishwasher is, I wonder what we have all sacrificed in sparing generations of children from the tradition of washing and drying the dishes. What lessons have gone untaught, what revelations have stayed untold because this post meal gathering has been done away?

My wife's grandmother's old Victorian house had not one, but two white porcelain sinks. One was in the kitchen and one was upstairs in a back bedroom where boarders rented adjoining rooms. All kinds of life's essential accessories found a permanent home on these old white porcelain sinks. You always knew where a bar of soap was with which to wash your hands and you knew the spot for the vegetable brush. These sinks were laboratories of real life to be constantly used, not to be visually beheld.

The invention of the dishwasher allowed architects to violate the one primary rule of kitchen design - the window over the sink. With more granite counters and tile backslashes and with stainless appliances and tiny little glass tiles and big islands - well, the designers thought they could divert attention from the fact that the sink had no view, that the world stage of children and weather and sky and birds could be withdrawn from the enjoyment of the person standing at the kitchen sink.

A window to the world positioned over a white porcelain sink is the formula for the perfect kitchen design.

Despite the trend towards fancy kitchens, perhaps there is cause to hope. Although they say to never go back, my wife and I stopped at her grandmother's house the other day. The same family is there who took Grandma's set of keys almost three decades back.

The man of the house was out raking leaves. We got out of the car and walked over to him, introduced ourselves. We talked old times and the kind of memories only an old, old house can command.

Somehow the conversion turned to that out-of-place, old porcelain sink up in the back bedroom. What I learned of its fate gives me new hope.

"Oh, I sold that," the homeowner reported of the old wall hung, white porcelain sink. "An architect saw my ad and bought it for his own home."