by Phyllis McCrossin
Life is returning to our normal. We left the Fortress of Solitude this weekend and joined the rest of the world.
The boys spent the night with us Saturday night, as their mother had to meet some clients in our area on Sunday. They stayed with us overnight and she picked them up today when she was finished.
It was good to have activity in the trailer again, but it’s also good now to have a little quiet before we start in again with our Poppa and Grandma Afterschool Daycare Monday.
I had a little grin last night. One of the boys came out of the bathroom with a bar of soap in his hand, “Grandma. You are out of soap.” Apparently he was trying to lather up without wetting the soap or his hands.
He’s not the first grandchild I’ve had to show how to use a bar of soap. Almost everyone uses liquid soap now I guess. I swing both ways – using both bar soap and liquid soap. I don’t have a favorite. The soap in question happened to be handmade, a gift from the owners of the campground in South Haven. They sell a lot of Michigan made products in their campground store, Kal Haven Outpost.
The soap episode made me think of the essay my Uncle John wrote about the house he and my mother and their siblings grew up in during the 1920s. (I included his essay in my book, “Who is that Stranger in the Chair,” the story of my mother’s struggle with dementia). It’s an interesting snippet of life on the farm.
So often we romanticize life in the “olden days,” when everyday living really was a lot of work. We don’t realize how easy things are today. I gripe when I have to pull clothes from the dryer and fold them never thinking about how much work doing laundry was years ago.
Here is an excerpt from the essay, and the book…
Doing the family wash was another story. At the beginning on the farm this was done every Monday morning, unless the weather was bad, in a large copper washboiler on the kitchen stove with the air in the kitchen not only overhung with steam but also heavily drenched with the nostril cleansing pungency of American Family soap or Felsnaptha soap which had been chipped by knife from a large bar, and the chipping had to be done finely so that the soap could easily melt. Then after the proper amount of boiling, the clothing would be transferred to a tub and each piece scrubbed by hand on the washboard, then placed in another tub of clean water for rinsing and finally hung outdoors to dry. In the winter clothing that was hung outside would soon stiffen into solid forms. When we became a bit more affluent, after weekly paychecks cane in from children working, we got a washing machine. Now it was no longer just the mother who did the scrubbing on the washboard, but the children who did a lot of this work by taking turns running the hand-operated washing machine, endlessly pushing a handle back and forth working a ratchet that swished the clothing back and forth inside the tub by means of a sort of short-legged three pronged stool. It was maddeningly boring work. But it had been determined in advance what the minimum number of back and forth strokes were to complete this ”wash-cycle” so there was at least a goal to work for, or rather ”pump” for. What a revolution it was when electricity came to the farm! Even the family washing routine was affected. Now by means of a belt and a small electric motor, all that was needed was the press of the switch. Of course, the water still had to be heated, the soap shaved, the clothing rinsed and then taken outdoors on the line to dry, but the ”work,” the real work (so we kids thought) was now done without human muscle-power.
Mom was the youngest of nine children. I can’t imagine the work Grandma did everyday just to cook, clean, keep house, have babies and take care of the family. In later years she and Mom also tended a market garden and traveled to the farmers’ market on Fulton Street in Grand Rapids twice a week.
It makes one pause to consider how much things have changed in 100 years.
May your troubles be less and your blessings be more and may nothing but happiness come through your door. – An Irish blessing
My book is self-published and is available on Amazon.