Trip down memory lane
A birthday call brings a trip down memory lane.
I reckon I’ve changed a ton of diapers in my life, starting when I was about 10. I was allowed to go home with my best friend from country school. Her job was to take over the care of the three smaller children while the mother moved on to outside chores.
The last time we were visiting in Iowa, that enabled me to say to a 75-yearold mom, “If you don’t hush up, I’ll tell everybody in this room that I’ve changed your diapers — yours and Steve’s.”
Fifteen years later, after World War II settled down, she became my very favorite sister-in-law and still is. This is her birthday month and it sent me down memory lane of diapers. I’ve spent many hours rinsing them in buckets of cold water pumped up from a deep well, summer and winter. They had to be rinsed well before they went into the first load in the washing machine. It was the first white load always and we took pride in the whiteness of them on the clothes line.
We remembered how she inherited her grandma’s old machine and how tickled I was when my father-in-law paid $5 at an auction for me for a washer with a wringer! Up ‘till then, I had done all washing in a bucket and wash board. It was that or haul all of it to Mom’s on a weekend and spend the day in the wash house. And, of course, we retold the story of how dumb I had been one time when I walked by the machine and stuck my hand in the water to see if it was warm. The donut heater was still in it. That was an electrical utensil to heat the water. The shock set me on a chair, hard! We lived in the country, no phone, car for work and me alone with three kids — dumb!
As we were tossing out memories, it was time to remind her of how the kids always enjoyed telling me how hard Daddy slapped me and how many times he did it when I was holding a light fixture we were going to mount on the house. I was barefoot and standing in wet grass when Willard plugged it in. Fortunately, I didn’t know anything about it, but they loved telling it and how Daddy took a hammer and beat the light fixture to pieces
Another time, I lucked out was when I had put two kids in front of our black and white TV to watch their favorite show while I carried buckets of water from across the road to fill the machine. My feet went out from under me and I hit my head so hard that I knew I was going to go black. I had to keep from it because of the babies. They were about 2- and 4-years-old. They came running and Terry kept shaking me and talking but I could not answer yet. She slipped in the water and sat down. Finally, he said to her, you better take off your wet dress and go get a blanket then we’ll go watch more of Roy Rogers and may be she’ll wake up. We’ve always been so lucky!
We say “Good bye ‘til next time.” I take a load from the washer, put it in the dryer, push “on” button. How did we do it 50 or 60 years ago? Simple! Because it had to be done and also we didn’t know any other way.
••• Editors note: Edith Lammey has been a resident of the area for nearly 40 years. She can be contacted through The Times at 4511196 or prtnews@nwaonline.com.