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We made do.
That??™s what
our families did.
As children,
we heard, ???we??™ll see??? a lot. ???We??™ll see??? was nothing more
than an expanded version of ???no.???
Those words
let you know that you probably weren??™t going to get what you
wanted, while allowing you to remain hopeful.
We grew up during a time when 100 miles was an eternity.
Our world
was wall-to-wall, not coast-to-coast. It was when
hot chocolate was always called cocoa. When getting a tan
wasn??™t living life on the edge. When a dessert was a happy
ending. This was an era when the world operated on
seniority.
It was a time
when it was common to see overhead lights with the strings
hanging from them with the knot on the end where flies met
and fell in love.
It was a time
when money wasn??™t plentiful. Piggy banks had to post armed
guards.
My wife and I
grew up in frugal households.
The homes were
frugal by necessity.
We fixed
everything on our farm with baling wire and baling twine.
We didn??™t use duct tape. Had we done so, we would never
have had the need to replace anything.
Economy made
for the occasional rocky road, but I??™ve found that sooner or
later, you appreciate the rocks.
Because of
this frugal upbringing, we tend to use things until they
have no more use in them. We try to squeeze the value out of
a dollar. We recycle.
I tell you all
of this so you will know why we have never thrown a piece of
soap away.
I??™m not
talking about chucking a bar or a cake away. Does anyone
call it a cake anymore? I??™m saying that we never throw a
small piece, a sliver or a remnant away.
We have soap
that never ends. We cannot finish a bar of soap.
We never
discard a crumb of soap.
It??™s not a bad
thing. It??™s being a wise consumer. To do otherwise, would
be improvident.
There is a
process that we follow. When a bar of soap has been worn
down to a nubbin, we break out a fresh, new bar. It??™s
typically of a brand that doesn??™t bring back painful
memories for me. I don??™t want to associate with a brand of
soap that reminds me of a taste that I connect with the
utterance of an obscene word during my boyhood years.
The new bar of
soap, stripped of its wrapping, finds its place on a shelf
in the shower. Meanwhile, the survivors of the previous
year??™s collection of soaps have huddled together in the same
shelf to welcome the new arrival. These tiny bits of soap
make those little bars of hotel soap seem like mountains in
comparison.
The small nits
are not content to languish in the soap dish. They become
hitchhiking slivers of soap.
This assorted
shrapnel gladly attaches itself to the new bar becoming a
kind of a tumorous growth on the bottom of the new bar of
soap.
They adhere to
the fresh soap and grow like stalactites.
This
supplementary soap is as useless as chicken poop on a pump
handle.
These
diminutive bits of soap are too small to handle comfortably
and we could easily cast the small pieces away.
But that would
be wasteful.
Oh, sometimes
I will consider the lumpy bars of soap and entertain the
urge to toss some of the soapy shrapnel down the drain.
That would allow me to enjoy the smooth, even surface of a
new bar the way it was meant to be enjoyed.
I suppose I
could make a bar out of the remnants, but nobody would use
them.
Our soap
situation has become a regular soap opera.
Soap is
important to my family in more ways than cleanliness.
I had a cousin
who was in the navy. When he was on a ship, he always
carried a bar of soap. He figured in the case of a
shipwreck, he would wash himself ashore.
As I said, I
have tasted soap.
Only chickens
were allowed to use fowl language on our farm.
???You watch
your language, young man, or I??™ll wash your mouth out with
soap!???
I heard that
and the next thing I knew, I had a mouthful of Lava soap.
The bars of
soap that we have in our home, the ones that appear to have
sudsy ticks on their bodies, would not be good for teaching
a youth the perils of a profanity-laced vocabulary.
We??™ll make
do.
???You watch
your language, young man, or I??™ll wash your mouth out with
broccoli!???
?©Al Batt 2005
7122 325 St.
Hartland, MN 56042
snoeowl @ aol.com
507-845-2836
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