Soaps of Choice

I’m soaped.

The last time a bar of soap squirted out of my hand, I searched for a better way.

I was a fan of Original Irish Spring because I liked the smell. Before that? It was so long ago that I have to conjure by color, and I think it was Dial.

What came before Dial is a wild wag, but when my adolescent face looked like other adolescent faces, the search was on for something better.

Dove was advertised as a good face cleaner, and I submitted to the claims.

Before that my main concern was being able to show my mother I had washed behind my ears. She couldn’t abide dirty feet, necks and ears.

My Phillips family made their own lye soap until the late 1940’s.

There was a rain barrel beside the house to catch run-off from the front porch. That water had to do triple-duty in soap making, making lye water for hominy and for washing clothes.

The rain barrel was hauled down the hill to the spring. The spring is where my grandmother kept wash tubs, cast iron pots and boards for “battling” clothes.

All that laundry business took place around the exposed roots of a massive sweet gum tree that is so old I can still stand inside it.

Water from that spring still runs. It is clear and sweet and was good enough for rinsing clothes, so I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t good enough for washing them.

Once the garments were rinsed, they went back up the hill, where a steel wire stretched in a spot clear of shadows. The line ran north and south with a pine limb in the middle to raise the line and keep the wet clothes from touching the ground.

The other side of my family were avid users of tar soap.

Nobody uses tar soap for their looks. Tar soap was and still is used as a home treatment for psoriasis, eczema, dandruff and other skin conditions.

Those grandparents were in the school business and were always having to treat kids for something.

Coal tar is creosote, which is gooey stuff that preserves railroad cross ties. Using coal tar soap is a very bad idea.

Pine tar soap is another matter. It is made from pine rosin, a yellow/orange resin collected from pine trees. The tar used to be collected by men scoring the bark from pine trees and collecting it in rectangular cups.

The “naval stores” industry supplied pine tar as “pitch” to seal wooden sailing ships.

When Joel Chandler Harris preserved the story of “The Tar Baby,” he wasn’t writing about pine soap but pine tar, and he didn’t explain how Brer Fox managed to build the Tar Baby without getting stuck himself.

I still like Irish Spring, but now it comes in a bottle.

joenphillips@yahoo.com