Snow

We just had a significant amount of snow during this past few days.  I shoveled off the driveway and today while at Matt and Lana's I cleaned off their deck.  What a heavy snow.   With each shovel full of snow Grace hollared, "Don't take that snow, I want to eat more."  How cute.  But I commented that if we in Canada would have had heavy snow like that it wouldn't have taken long to get bath water melted or snow for washing clothes.  We did not have a water supply on our farm so we melted snow for washing, bathing and washing dishes and clothes.  When we got snow in we tried to get the snow  from lower down because that was filled with more moisture than the light weight snow that was on top. 

So in winter we only took bathes every other Saturday.  We had a galvanized tub behind the house.  This served as our freezer inbetween.  Food was piled under it in order to keep it froze and the tub kept the animals from getting to our food.  Then for the time that we took a bath we covered the food securely with something else.  We carried the tub into John's room and water was put in it.  First Peter and Ben usually took a bath.  Then Mom usually was next and then me and last John.  We just added more hot water with each person getting into the tub.  Dad usually did not bath in winter.  Why?  I'm not sure.  This now to me seems very grose.  We washed out hair in a basin seperately in the kitchen before we bathed.  We didnot wash our faces or heads in this water that was used by previous bathers....  Also, we did not have shampoo so I often washed my hair with hand soap or laundry detergent.  And often my hair was just as greasy as it was before I washed it.  Nor did we have deoderant.  Such items were  luxury that we couldn't afford.  For a long time we didn't have tooth pasted either.  We used salt water.   Then we would carry the bath water out Sunday morning and put the tub over the food again. 

In summer we used water out of our dugout or hauled it in barrels from a near by lake or used rain water that had collected in a barrel off of the house roof.  Then in summer we did take weekly bathes.

Things changed in 1973 when plumbing was put in houses, and also telephones became a household item also. 

No wonder we didn't have boyfriends before we left the farm and moved to the city.  But this was a common way of life amoungst the poor people there.  I believe we all smelt the same but maybe some more than others.