Wednesday, June 19, 2013

"Lye Soap" © by Abe Lincoln

When I got out of bed and went downstairs the first thing I did; and if I didn’t do it my mother would remind me: “Wash off!”

So I reached up and took the wash pan off the nail where it hung for generations and put it in the old iron sink – the one with the pitcher pump where we got rain water from the cistern. My dad had dug the cistern out and lined it with brick and plastered over the brick. The eve spouts emptied all the rain from our tin roof into the cistern so we always had plenty of soft water to wash in and it was especially great for washing hair. Mom said it was the only water to use if you wanted to get suds from real homemade lye soap.

The water we drank and the water used in cooking came from the deep well pump outback. There was a kind of shed roof, covered with tin that was attached to the back of the house and offered protection when you had to get a bucket of coal or corn cobs for the stoves from the barn. And that’s where the deep water well pump was located. So getting a drink of cold well water involved going outside to pump it.


We didn’t really have a barn, barn, but it was a covered building behind the house bigger than a modern two-car garage. Mom and dad stored their garden tools in it and George Meyers delivered coal to us and shoveled it in through a small window. The coal pile was inside, sheltered from the rain and snow.

Lump coal was cheaper than coal ready to shovel in the stove so mom got lump coal and gave me an axe or hatchet to break the lumps up into a manageable size. I remember sitting there and swinging the hatchet and the pieces of coal flying off. I had to do it long enough to get a coal bucket full. Coal slack was all the fine stuff left over after breaking up all the lumps. I was always reminded to put small amounts in the stove and not to cover up the flames with the finer, slack, coal. If you did, it might explode and knock the stove pipe off and scatter smoke and soot all over the room.

Right next to the wash pan was another nail and mom always hung a community was rag on that nail. I suppose she washed it out but then maybe not since it was always in the wash pan several times each day and was used by mom and dad and me to wash off with. We had one wash rag and one towel that we all used. Most families had a galvanized wash tub and that was where the Saturday night bath took place – usually in the middle of the kitchen floor in the winter or the summer.

Mom said I didn’t have to take a bath if I had been swimming in Mud Creek or some other swimming hole. I didn’t carry a bar of soap with me but I did think that any dirt on my body would come off if I stayed in the creek long enough.

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