Rise and Shine By Abraham Lincoln

If it was really cold mother would put old newspapers under the mattress to keep the cold from seeping through. My old feather tick mattress was like sleeping on a giant pillow and sinking in the mattress helped kept me warm. We had quilts and blankets on top of flannel sheets and once under all of this stuff the weight was almost enough to make turning over impossible.

I slept under a tin roof that echoed every noise there was and rain hitting it would put me to sleep. I also slept next to one window that was older than the roof and there were gaps all around it and through these gaps came a whispering sound or a steady roaring noise depending on how hard the wind was blowing outside.

If it was snowing and blowing then the windowsill would soon have neat little row of snow on it. And when I woke up in response to mother’s call to get up I had to shake the snow off my top blanket trying not to let it fall on the floor where I had to step with my bare feet. I never had PJs but wore my long underwear to bed and from the bed covered with snow, to downstairs standing by the cook stove, was a journey I never did relish but made it every day.

Our toilet was an outside privy and it was often too cold to walk out there to use the toilet in the morning. So all families had pee cans set somewhere in the bedroom or kitchen and we used those when we got up. It seemed like the mothers emptied the pee cans into a larger pot and then that would be emptied into the privy later in the morning.

Sometimes it would be so cold that the pee would freeze solid in the pee cans and had to be set on the cook stove long enough to thaw out so it could be dumped out leaving enough room to use when you got up.



Mom would be frying eggs in the skillet and remind me to come and get the can.

From that trip downstairs to getting ready for school was a 3-stage process I guess all children took. The kitchen sink, with a pitcher pump, was big enough to accommodate a white porcelain basin. And mothers poured enough hot water from the teakettle into the basin and pumped some well water into it to make it just right to wash off.

A washrag was used by everyone with a cake of homemade lye or boughten soap to wash off. If you could afford to buy soap like Lifebuoy Toilet Soap, that was colored pink, and it was used to wash your face, neck, hands, under arms and some private places—but boys often forgot and were reminded by mothers—did you wash everything?

That little amount of water was dumped in the sink after the washrag was wrung out and hung on the nail over the sink. And then it was time to eat breakfast before walking to school. I never owned a real toothbrush and never saw a tube of toothpaste so we didn’t brush our teeth. Sometimes mom would use the same washrag to wash or rub over my teeth and that would be it.