Thankful---part1

Late last night, after cleaning up a pet's accident, I found myself grateful once again for the miracle of running hot water. This sentiment may seem odd to most people in this country, but becomes more understandable when I reveal that I spent my first twelve years without this marvelous convenience.

Our domestic shortcoming affected my hardworking parents much more than me. They were the ones who had to deal with all its implications on a daily basis while I, a child and not knowing any better, wasn't bothered all that much. At least that's how I remember it, suspecting that time has erased some of the more gruesome details of growing up in a poor, post-war, cold-water-only household.

One thing I do remember vividly is the weekly bath my brother and I got to enjoy on Saturday nights. My father would haul the huge, galvanized metal tub from the basement where it resided next to our annual allotment of coal, a large wooden bin filled with potatoes and a stash of home-canned goods unrivaled in our village.

The tub was set up in the middle of the kitchen, while on the stove water was boiling merrily in mother's large canning kettle. Combined with enough cold water to keep it from scalding us, it filled the tub just slightly less than half full. To make the bath more interesting, my mother added a round pine-scented bath cake which, upon dissolving in a burst of fizzy bubbles, filled the room with an intensely foresty fragrance and turned the water that special shade of green known as "hazardous chemical spill".

The scrubbing my brother and I received was intense, making up on that one occasion for all the previous nights we went increasingly unwashed. It's hard to keep a body clean when all you have to work with is a cold-water faucet at the kitchen sink, the bathroom a luxury that didn't become a part of my life until I was almost a teenager. Since we spent all our free time playing outside, we must have been two remarkably dirty children.

The above-mentioned tub was also an essential part of my mother's weekly washday. For this she would go to another of the basement and fire up the small wood burning stove squatting there. With much water hauling and water boiling, engulfed in steam, suds and sweat, with the aid of a washboard, a stiff brush and a slippery hunk of yellow soap, she somehow managed to clean the entire laundry created by a family of four.

Anyone guessing that there was no electric dryer to cope with all this wet wash is guessing correctly. Outside to the clotheslines it went, piled high in basket after heavy basket, in weather of every description. It was on winter washdays I became acquainted with the expression "freeze-dried". It was something that happened to our laundry, its usefulness in food preservation still largely unknown. I remember many a half-dark, foggy winter afternoon when, walking home from school, I was greeted by those ghostly frozen forms hanging motionless in our yard like empty shells abandoned by their departed souls.

to be continued...