[Editor’s Note: Aunt Naomi didn’t really split things into parts. I’ve done that to make them more or less the right size for posts, and so that we could comment about them as we go along. However, this does mark the point in the story that AUnt Naomi calls “Chapter 1”.]
When I was about 5 or 6 years old, the REA (Rural Electric Association) came to our community and we had our house “wired” so we could be modern and have electricity. This was a very exciting time. Everyone was talking about how the house was going to be “wired.”
No one ever explained anything to me… so every evening when I came home from school I would run up to the house and look for the wire that would be wound around it. I didn’t know it would be inside the walls! Nobody ever told me anything. I spent most of my life feeling stupid!!! There was a lot of thin copper wired left lying around the electric poles that were installed on the farm. The wires had a rubber coating on them, but Mahlon showed us how to peel the coating off to get to the copper wire. He showed us how to bend and shape these to write our names and wear as pins.
When we learned that there was such a thing as a “shower” we decided we should have one, so in our countrified way, we made one (only in summer). We had a bucket that was used to feed the newborn calves. It had a large rubber nipple on it. We filled the bucket with water, hung it in a tree in a secluded place and let the water stream down on us from the nipple. I think we also used old buckets with holes. This worked just fine and we were perfectly happy with our shower and our homemade lye soap.
Lloyd Jr. says
They must have been tired after explaining things to 10 other kids before you. I can just see it, “Did I teach this one how to milk the cows? Oh well. she’ll figure it out sooner or later.”