Have not written in a while..too much going on! When I was younger, in my 30's and 40's, I was the Energizer Bunny! Never stopped, it seemed...Where did all that energy go?
I worked three 12-hour days over the Labor Day weekend. My son, Jimmy, his wife, Esther, and their three daughters (September, Summer, and Sunday) came in late Sunday night to spend the night with me. While I got up and went to work at DePaul the next morning, they went to Homestead Heritage, near my place in Elm Mott, planning to attend the Sorghum Festival...however, with Esther having a baby in January, they decided to see it later when the weather is cooler.
Homestead Heritage is an old-timey working- homestead farm that has preserved the rural Texas ways of life. The festival offered a demonstration making sorghum syrup, a staple of early rural Texas, as well as cornbread made from corn ground in an authentic on-site 1760's stone gristmill, homemade ice cream, fresh lemonade, barbecue, and many antique crafts and demonstrations.
I wanted Jimmy to get me some homemade soap from their gift shop, as that is what I have used for nearly sixty years to wash my face. It is 100% pure, unscented, and super-fatted, and doesn't dry out my sensitive facial skin.
I remember my grandmother, Sallie Lee Allen Head, making homemade soap in a huge black cast-iron cauldron over an open fire in the backyard of 2224 North 4th Street in the late 40's and early 50's. We lived next door to my paternal grandparents and stayed at their house a lot.
Mama Head, as we called her, let the younger cousins and me help make the fire, quite exciting to a four-year-old. I remember bringing baskets of corn cobs and corn shucks, gathered and dried from corn grown in our own garden, for her to put into the fire under the big cauldron. Corn cobs and husks were supposed to make the fire burn hotter than wood. (This was the same cauldron that she used for washing clothes...we also enjoyed helping build the fire under it for that purpose.)
Once the fire was hot enough, she put in a can of Red Devil lye, all the bacon fat, lard, shortening, and grease from cooking that she had been saving for months, and maybe some water. The lye would make it foam at first. She stirred it with a big wooden paddle. The soap would cook down and look like thick gravy. You could make soft soap and pour it into fruitjars, or let it cook down even more to thicken, then pour it into square pans to harden and cut into blocks. Soap made with used cooking lard, shortening, or bacon grease would give the soap a brownish color and a slightly rancid smell.
An old family friend, Cotton Cling, made soap in that same kettle by using brand new cans of Crisco Shortening and lye, making the most beautiful, whitest soap with no rancid smell at all. Even after Mama Head died in 1955, Cotton would come over and make that wonderful white soap. The brown soap cleaned just as well, but did not smell as good or look as pretty as the soap made with the unused Crisco.
The brown soap was used mainly for washing clothes, cleaning chores, and washing your hands. Even after we got a modern washing machine in the house, I remember my mother using a sharp knife to shave off small slivers of homemade soap to wash a load of clothes and to wash dishes. We used homemade soap because it was cheaper than store-bought, and every penny really counted back then. You know that saying: A penny saved is a penny earned.
Nothing was wasted back then. People were very self-sufficient, growing or making most of what they needed, rather than buying it. At that time in our history, America was not yet a consumer society. It took me many years to realize that the Heads, my daddy's family, were the genuine article, a true pioneer family, that due to the hardships of the Great Depression and the citizen sacrifices of World WarII, still lived that simple way of life, in spite of living at the edge of the city of Waco with its urban ways. Anyway, I want some more homemade soap, so I will go one day to Homestead Heritage's gift shop.
Jimmy, Esther, and the girls went on that day to the Baylor Mayborn Museum (with air conditioning!). They really enjoyed the Pioneer Village, with all the old 1880's -town wooden buildings...the tenant farmer's house, the sharecropper's house, the beautiful wooden church (getting to ring the churchbell and sit down and play the old piano!), the little red school house, the lawyer's office, the general store, the saloon, the hotel, the cotton gin, and the livery stables, all realistically outfitted with period furniture and historic fixtures.
There were cool breezes off the Brazos River and lots of shade under the huge pecan trees. In the museum, the Pioneer Homestead Room and the room with costumes from around the world are the girls' favorite places ...they can play "Little House on the Prairie" and "Dress up" !!!! They enjoyed showing everything to their parents, as they and I had spent over seven pleasurable hours there one afternoon this past August. It is one of our most favorite places.
