House with Rain Barrels
Now that the end is in sight, Nyel is beginning to mention a few things that he’s looking forward to. Like a shampoo – which, of course, implies a shower complete with coursing water, foaming soap, and a long-handled back scrubber. But it’s only the shampoo that he has spoken of with some wistfulness.
Not that he hasn’t had a shampoo (actually, several) in the six weeks he’s been bed-bound. The hospital sent us home with a supply of spiffy shampoo caps – magical little numbers that get the job done. “Not satisfactory,” says the patient… but he doesn’t really complain.
First Bathtub
When Nyel asked about showering at his pre-op appointment back in August, his surgeon said, “You will become the King of the Sponge Baths.” Amen to that. What he didn’t say was that I would become the Queen of the Water Carriers – to say nothing of the soapy washcloths, the towels and the various basins and other accoutrements and of the laundry generated in that process. It’s “quite a course of sprouts” (as my mother would have said, and “it wears me to a frazzle” (another one of hers.)
It all puts me in mind of my grandmother in the days when her running water was from the single tap in the kitchen and came directly from the rain barrels on the roof. I often wonder how everyone got bathed and if it was a regular Saturday night ritual in the kitchen – heating the water on the wood cook stove etc. I do know that the children “went bathing” in the bay during the summer and I don’t think that was another way of saying “went swimming.” But I doubt that they took soap with them!
Gordon in the Bath
By 1938 when electricity came to Oysterville – by which time all the children were grown and long gone – an electric pump was installed. The biggest event in the history of the house took place then: the storage closet off the library (once-upon-a-time, the kitchen pantry) became the first inside bathroom, complete with a tiny claw foot tub tucked under the stairwell. Forty years later, when my folks renovated and upgraded the house for ‘modern living,’ that little bathroom was converted to a wet bar. But they kept the tub!
So… while Nyel is looking forward to the very practical matter of clean hair, I’ve been wishing I had a photograph of my mom or one of her siblings when they were little enough to bathe in a washtub in the kitchen. I do have a darling photograph of Gordon Schoewe ‘in the bath’ that has had a place of honor in my own bathroom for almost forty years. A wonderful reminder of Gordon and of how it used to be… But, somehow, Nyel could care less right now.
In my Ilwaco bathroom I have an enlargement of a picture of my dad and his brother in a galvanized tub when they were wee. It must have been summer for they are in the yard in Bona, Missouri. I an grateful for indoor plumbing and water heaters!