The Weekly Bath by Keith Hall
As I was taking my morning shower the other day like I normally do daily I thought how blessed we are just to have warm water and a
shower. I began to go through the process in my head of how the water pump, pumps
the water out of the ground and how the water fills up in a hot water heater
and it is heated and stored for use at our convenience. I began to think how
our grandfather's would have accomplished this a hundred years ago.
There was no pump or electricity to pump the water and the
water was carried from a spring in mulltiple buckets. Can you imagine how many buckets it
would have taken to fill up a tub? Families today consist of four to five people. Families a hundred years ago usually had on an average of ten to twelve people.
This would involve ten to twelve people having to take a bath. A hundred years
ago people had large families to help farm, raise food, cut wood, (with a saw
or axe) so they could stay warm and not freeze to death.
Families had one large tub and everyone would pitch that was ten or an older to bring water from the spring in as many buckets
that they owned to fill the tub. Buckets were an important commodity but today we take no thought in owning one. The water of course would have been so cold
that it was heated on a wood stove and then poured into the tub. It could have been
decided one of two ways who would get to go first. The eldest to the youngest
or the youngest to the eldest. There was no changing the water after each bath
but everyone used the same bath water. This is why I titled this the weekly
bath. People usually bathed once a week and a shower was unheard of at this
time. There wasn’t any running water, hot water heaters, or showers. That is
why you see in the old western movies men going into town to a public bath.
The next time you get into the shower and think how good the
warm water feels then realize how blessed you are to have something as nice as
a shower. Many parts of the world today still bathe just the way I described
because they are living a hundred years behind modern times. A major
catastrophe could happen someday and take away what we take for granted. People
now have to worry about how dry their skin gets in the winter time when the
heat is on and the hot showering everyday also removes the oil from
KEITH HALL
