Day 14

Cleanliness

Since I have very few options available to me. I think that we will stick to washing up with the pitcher and bowl. Then doing the weekly bath. Now this is funny because this is where the saying don’t toss the baby out with the bath water comes from…. Dad, male children, Mom, female children and then the baby would be washed in the same bathwater as everyone else…. ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwww! Can you imagine only being able to bathe once a week or even less. Man the thought of that really does make my skin crawl. But in hard times things need to be done that you would never think of doing in the civilized world.

Hauling the water, heating it up, hauling the hot water to the bathing area. That is a ton of work.

In the summer I can see us setting up a solar shower in the yard. The water could be caught and reused ( I know gross )… or it could be used to water the garden. We could even get an old metal tub and light a fire under it to heat the water for outside bathing.

Then what about clothing. I know I cover some of this in the laundry section, day 9, but I watch Frontier House for the first time and something struck me odd. Women use to wear aprons everyday, a new one. The reason was to keep the clothes clean, so that they didn’t need to washed but once a week or less. But the aprons were washed everyday because they dried so much faster then the outer clothes would in the weather.

A point that Wendy Brown points out is without power or limited power, How are you going to keep your carpets clean? Yep, that’s right no vacuums. The only rooms I have carpet is the 3 bedrooms. The rest of the house has linoleum or hard wood with through rugs. The rugs can be taken out and beat with a broom to get the dirt out of them. The floors just swept and washed.

Things to Do or Get

1. Buy another wood handled natural broom
2. See if they still sell wisk brooms
3. Look into setting up an outside bathing arrangement
4. Make more aprons

Yart