We got our water from a pitcher pump outside of our house. There was a water pail in the kitchen with a "community" dipper for drinking water and a wash pan nearby for "washing up". I always drank from the dipper near the handle hoping no one else did. I did the same thing at our little one room country school. We cooked our meals on a big wood stove until we got a new fangled kerosene stove with four burners. It was much easier to gauge the heat for cooking and baking, but Mama swore the food did not taste near as good as that cooked on the old wood stove. Mama washed clothes on the "board" I still can hear her saying "if you youngins' knew how hard it is to get your clothes clean, you would not get them so dirty " We used "sad" irons that heated on the cook stove. Mama would lick her finger and lightly tap the bottom of the iron to see if it was ready to iron clothes. If it did not sizzle, it was not ready yet. If it was too hot, one would scorch the whites. We used three kerosene lamps to light the rooms of our house. My job was to fill the lamps from the spigot of the kerosene barrel outside. I despised the job and the smell of kerosene. UGH ! We also had wood burning heating stoves in which you burned the side of you nearest the stove and froze the opposite side. Our floors that were not bare wood, had linoleum coverings. Hopping out of bed on a cold winter morning was not a fun thing to do. No one liked getting out of bed from your nice warm feather tick mattress, with quilts piled so high on top of us that we could barely breathe from the weight. Sometimes we added newspapers between the layers to hold more body heat. We had no indoor bathrooms so baths were taken in a galvanized washtub. Water was from the pump outside and warmed by hot water from our two teakettles. During the winter months, we bathed near a stove. We had a toilet with a path out back of the house. My parents got electricity in 1951, after I left home. For me, those olden days are just great memories, not the way I want to live today Good old days ?? Nah, I'll just take the Central heat and air, and all of the new appliances any day over those olden days. |
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Created December 19, 2020
Updated: 15 June, 2021
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