Playhouse

I usually find the best things while looking for something else, or as somebody else said, You don't find anything good unless you're looking for something.

Third Grade

When I found Michael Horvich's blog --I forget what I was searching for maybe touch quilts for alzheimer's patients-- it grabbed my interest. He made no quilts but he took exquisite care of his partner, Gregory. Reading memories of Michael's early life began to remind me of my own.

Since Charms for an Easy Life has never found a real voice, it might work as a kind of childhood memoir. The only thing I know to do is to jump right in at no particular place for no reason for being there.

Washhouse is at far right. Picture taken about 5 years before I was born.

The playhouse was one of those things where a structure is used to fill the need of the moment. It was a shed build onto the side of what we called the washhouse. The washhouse held a big wooden churn on a structure that allowed it to be turned with an iron handle, once a feature of the family dairy decades earlier. The Churn fell into disuse but was never discarded. Hanging above it on a nail was a fox skin that Brother Mack tacked up there years before.  The main feature was the washing machine and two zinc washtubs. We had no electricity until later . The washing machine had a gasoline motor which was kick-started like a motorcycle.

The shed room was used for showering until electricity came to the countryside and we had running water. The shed was divided into two small rooms, one windowless and plastered half way up with cement. There was a 30 gallon barrel on the roof. Early in the day, a gasoline engine a quarter mile away in the pasture pulled a pump to pump water from a well to fill the barrel. After the sun shone on it all day, there was warm water for showers for the family.

I can hardly remember ever having a shower, too small to reach the spigot that fed the shower head. I think I bathed in a little oval enamel tub in the house, filled with hot water from the reservoir on the wood stove. The coming of electricity was the end of the wood stove, the bathhouse and the kerosene refrigerator.

When the bathhouse was in use no more, Daddy Mack cut a window in the dark side of the shed and I had a two room playhouse, a real playhouse with a roof and windows and a door. The small window in what had been the dressing room was hinged to swing up and open and was high on the wall so nobody could peek at the girls inside back in bathhouse days. No matter the esthetics, it was a place to play with dolls and such. Even on cold days, I could open the door which faced east and play in the warmth of late morning sun, out of the chill north wind.

Mrs. Miller who lived up across the railroad almost half a mile away was my good friend. If Mama watched, I could walk down the lane, cross the highway, go up and over the railroad and on to Mrs. Miller's house. She and I shared the same birthday. She took great interest in my playhouse. Mr. Miller worked at the Company Store in the mill village where I went to school.

Among my treasures from Mrs. Miller was one of the first plastic boxes I ever saw, I think it may have held margarine, which was not something that we bought, as we had real butter enough for our family and to sell to Mama's milk customers who came to the house to buy glass gallon jugs full of fresh whole milk. Mama had some customers who asked her to skim some of the thick cream off the top, which she was glad to do because it went into the churn for even more butter. I guess they didn't know about whipping cream for fruit salad and ambrosia.

Mrs. Miller fashioned orange crates into a little bench and a tiny cabinet for the playhouse. My 'stove' was the warming top off the old wood stove, which I could pretend had two ovens. Two andirons left from the days when wood was burned in fireplaces in the house were outside the door, my 'horses.' Wood fireplaces were fitted with grates that held coal from Alabama mines. One of my chores when I was older was to bring in buckets of coal from the pile beside the old lily pool where dump trucks with Alabama tags unloaded several tons of coal at the onset of winter.

Childish imaginations turned bits and pieces of cast off items like empty deodorant jars and lids from peanut butter glasses into household items. We had dolls and tea sets and Mama's old high heels and hats for dress up.

One of my favorite things for playhouse 'cooking' was bran left from sifting cornmeal that was water ground at a grist mill a few miles away, down on Euharlee creek. Bran was usually scattered to the chickens but I could have a little jar of it to play with, cleaner than mud pies.

We turned scraps of fabric and grubby discarded hair ribbons into doll clothes. Imagine how we delighted in having something as exotic as a clean medicine dropper and bottle that once held eye drops, or a cigar box.