Speaking of Buttons....
When my Mom did her mending, she would bring out the button box. While she was mending, I would play with the buttons. I put the pretty colored ones in one pile. I put the average buttons in another pile. And I had a pile for the ugly ones. I pretended they were people. The pretty ones were the popular ones. They would not let the ugly ones play with them. The average ones were usually the grownups. They were usually the larger buttons.
I remember the prettiest of the buttons was a blue button with ruffled edges. I named her Sally Ann. One of the ugly buttons was a grayish-white button that I named Sour Sour. I also played with other inanimate objects. My Dad had an old army flashlight that was khaki in color. I named her Barbara the Flashlight. I spent many hours playing with these objects and making them into families and having them go to school etc. Sour Sour was actually Sally Ann's younger brother. He was kind of like Charlie Brown; always the underdog and Sally Ann was like Lucy; always the one who got all the attention and thought she was better than anyone else.
The Milk
When I was growing up, my mother always wanted to buy a house that had a lot of land so we could have a garden and animals. In 1953, we moved to a home in Lakeview that had an acre of land. My mother also wanted a milk cow. She loved milk. So we got Jersey milk cow. My dad had to milk the cow (by hand)morning and night. He would get up before work and milk. Then when the milk was brought in, we had to strain it and the milk from the night before. It often had hairs and dirt in the milk. We poured the milk through the strainer. Then we poured the milk into a large container and put it in the fridge to chill. After it chilled awhile, we took it out and the cream had settled to the top. We skimmed the cream off the top and put it in a bowl. We then poured the milk into 2 quart containers. We could not get all the cream out however, so when drinking the milk we often got lumps of cream which I didn't like and would often gag on. My mother loved the lumps of cream. After the cream dish was full, we would churn butter. We had a churn that you turned the handle around and around until the cream became butter.
We would get about a gallon of milk from each milking. I don't know how we ever drank that much milk. We never got anything to drink at our meals other than milk or water. Because of that, I craved Kool Aid and pop. My mother hated pop and Kool Aid so she didn't understand why we craved it. We only got pop on 4th of July and Kool Aid at my Grandma's house. (Grandma didn't like milk)
Having a milk cow was a pain. It was hard to go on trips because you had to be there for the milking. Also, we had a couple of cows bloat and my mother would take that so hard. One morning I woke to hear my mother sobbing. When I asked her what was wrong she told me the cow bloated and that we were so poor and had spent so much on that cow. We also bred the cows to have calves. One of our cows started to deliver her calf and I was the first to see. I ran to the house to tell my parents. They got angry at me for watching the cow have a calf and told me I could not go up there and watch again. They acted like it was something shameful. So I became afraid of birth and I also thought it was something terrible because it wasn't explained to me.
Mending day was usually on Wednesdays. My mother would put all the clothes that needed mending in a basket. On mending day she would separate the clothes. The ones that needed buttons would be in one pile; the ones that needed stitching would be in another, and the socks would be in yet another. My mother had a large box of misc buttons. She would go through the buttons and find the ones that matched the closest to the ones that needed to be replaced.
The socks were the most interesting of her mending chores. The mending of socks was called 'darnng.' She would get a burned-out light bulb and put the sock over the bulb with hole that needed mending. The bulb was to hold the sock out so she see the hole and have it held in place. She would then get needle and thread and stitch the hole in the sock until the hole was all stitched over. I was always too lazy to do that. When one of our socks got a hole in it, I just threw the socks away and bought new ones. Not my mother. She grew up in the depression and you didn't throw anything away if you could fix it or eat it later. When my mother made a cake she was so frugal about getting every bit of the batter out that there was never any cake batter for us to lick.
Ironing Day
Ironing day was usually on Tuesday. We would take the sprinkled clothes from the plastic wrap and iron them. There was no such thing as permanent press. We had to iron little girl dresses that had lots of ruffles and pleats and was really a chore to iron. We even ironed bras and pillow cases. Everything was always very wrinkled. The starched clothes were especially hard to iron because they scortched really easy; so you had to be really careful.
My grandma used her coal stove to heat the iron. She did not have an electric iron. She would put a heavy metal iron on the stove and let it heat and when it was hot, she would iron her clothes. I really hated ironing day, especially with my two girls and all their dresses. Dryers and permanent press clothes have made a woman's work so much easier.
Back in the 'old days" you had a certain day to do your chores.
Monday: Wash Day
On wash day, you could expect the wash would consume your whole day. My grandma would roll out her wringer washing machine into the kitcen and fill it up using a rubber hose hooked to the sink. She had two other tubs sitting on wooden stools, one filled with 'bueing' as she called it, (blue powder was added to make clothes whiter) and the other with rinse water. She would also fill a large metal container with water and boil the water on her coal stove. Very dirty clothes such as my grandpa's work clothes from the mine would be boiled in that water. She would use a large stick to stir the clothes up. She would then start the washer and add homeade lye soap. She would wash the whites first and then continue to the colors washing each in the same wash water. The washer had a wringer attached and you would wring the clothes through the wringer to get the water out of them. More soap and and water would be added as needed.
My grandma would then prepare the starch. She would fill a large container with water and add powdered starch. The clothes that she starched were mainly dress shirts, skirts and dresses. She would put the clothes in the starch water until they were saturated with the water and starch.
My mother did her wash the same way until in the 1950's we finally got an automatic washer. My mother's first automatic had a suds saver. With the suds saver you could drain the washer out while you clothes spinned and then suck it back up again to do another batch. I myself only used a wringer washer for a short time when I was first married and their was one in the house we rented. I will be adding another entry on how we dried our clothes.
The other part of wash Day was drying the clothes. That could be very pleasant experience or it could be not-so-fun experience, depending on the weather.
We had a clothes line that went from one side of our backyard to the other. You would take the clothes outside in the clothes basket and hang them on the clothes line using wooden pins called clothes pins.
On a pleasant Spring, Fall or Summer day, it was a soothing experience to hang the clothes and watch them flowing in the breeze. I loved being outdoors hanging them. Winter however, was something else. You would run out and hang them as fast as you could, your hands so numb from the cold that you could hardly feel the clothes pins. You would let the clothes hang out there, sometimes as many as 2 or 3 days hoping they would get dry. When you went to retieve the clothes, they would be frozen stiff. Many a time I brought in sheets and other things that were so frozen they could stand on their own. I dried clothes this way until 1967 when I got my first clothes dryer.
After the clothes thawed, you would get pop bottle with a sprinkler on the top and fill it with water and sprinkle the clothes with water. Then you would take the sprinkled clothes and put them in a large plastic bag and let them sit overnight and get moist and ready for ironing day. And that's another day.
There was a time when I got so tired of trying to dry clothes in the cold wet Winter, that Alex strung a clothes line in the basement so I could dry our clothes there. That was much better than going out in the cold.
I do miss seeing the bright white sheets flowing in the breeze and the smell of the clothes that were dried outside. Sometimes, however, they would not smell so good. If someone had a bonfire or something, they would pick up that smell. Sometimes wasps would get in the clothes though and you had to be careful when taking them down. A wasp once got in one of my brother's Levi pant legs and when he put his pants on, he got stung.
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