House Cleaning

Old soap. I’m drawn to artifacts that demonstrate how our elders accomplished everyday tasks. My uncle had a wooden box. The footprint was the size of a cell phone and about three inches deep: He kept orphan hardware in it.

I never questioned why he called it the “soap box” until I saw a demonstration of soap making. The box was actually a soap mold.

My dad watched his mother make lye soap from rendered tallow and lye water. “Soap making time” closely followed the cool days of fall when they processed a couple of pigs.

Another wooden box looked like a trough for feeding animals but was lined with burlap and flour sack material. It was filled with hardwood ashes from the fireplace and as rain water was poured through the ashes lye leached into the water to form “lye water” for making soap.

Rain water was captured in a couple of wooden barrels.

In that time, the only soap in rural homes was homemade lye soap, and it was used to wash everything from laundry to bodies.

In a corner of the basement, Dad took down a block of something wrapped in wax paper. It was a block of lye soap his mother made well over a hundred years before.

As I write this, the fallow fields and road sides are full of tall tan grasses growing in clumps. Broom sage will grow in fields that don’t support anything else because of high soil pH and poor fertility.

Porches and walkways were swept using sage brooms, but inside they made a bigger mess than they cleaned.

Sage was cut close to the ground by the fists full and the bottoms chopped with a cleaver so that when combined the sage looked like a spear point.

They were cleaned of small bits and seeds by dragging them across a board with the tips of nails sticking up to remove seed heads. String wrapped tightly around the hank of sage formed the handle of the broom.

The least complicated domestic tool was a twig broom, which was small limbs bound in a bundle and used for sweeping the yard. In a time before lawn mowers, the “yard” was swept clean.

At some time, the floors of a house would be cleaned with something other than clean river sand.

The earliest mops were made of bundles of dried corn shucks stuffed into holes bored into a board and attached to a hickory handle.

Farm families had more corn shucks than they needed, so a corn shuck mop or mattress wasn’t taking material that had a higher use somewhere else.

People used what they had — tallow, ashes, rain water, weedy tall grass, corn shucks. Individually they are unimpressive, but with imagination, they formed the tools of life.

joenphillips@yahoo.com