Saving Soap

Why did I do

that? It is true that men do things without really understanding why ourselves. Is it habit? An artifact of a family practice?

My bar of Irish Spring soap was coming apart, broken into slivers and pieces.

With soap of a different chemistry, one could hand-compress the pieces into a chunk and continue scrubbing. Something changed.

I picked up the pieces and put them into the box of the new bar.

Later I thought about the soap slivers and wondered where that practice came from.

My parents came of age during the “great depression” when everything was used and re-used until it was used up. This notion is against the grain of our disposable society in which we toss products that are designed and built for one time use.

My mother kept a jar to collect slivers and chunks of soap.

When the jar was nearly full, she put it into a pot of hot water until the slivers melted. She poured the melted soap into an aluminum mold, and it solidified into the shape of a popsicle.

My mother collected pins, needles and hair pins. Even when her collection of straight pins rusted, she didn’t throw them away. She had a ragged old pin cushion for those.

The catch phrase of her generation was “ I’ll find some use for it.” Once she tried to use a rusted pin to replace the needle of a record player.

My father never resisted picking up a bent nail.

A bent nail will always be a bent nail, but my dad was not above trying to bang it straight with a hammer. He wasn’t above recycling rusted screws, bolts and other hardware.

He wound string into balls and wire into hanks. He had a long line of piecedtogether cotton plow line that was rotted and wouldn’t stay knotted.

My parents grew up in homes where lye soap was made from beef tallow. Rain water dripped through a container of hardwood ashes. Potash leached into the water creating lye-water.

The lye-water and fat, when combined, solidified in wooden molds of soap that were used for floors, laundry, dishes and bodies.

Odd containers of things still turn up. A rusted coffee can of hardware saw light for the first time in decades. There were actually a few items that might see some use, such as the screen door hardware and spring.

The wick from a kerosene lamp is too rotten to use. There are a few horseshoe nails.

There is the metal remainder of the pick from a manual corn sheller. The leather has rotted away.

That’s OK. I’m a little short of dried ears of corn anyway.

joenphillips@yahoo.com