As a child in the 1950s, I lucked into the best of farm life…

Less of the actual work

More of the joy

In our remote rural setting, we were also effectively a generation or so behind the modern world. I’m a bit of an anachronism.

A regular chore in every household was to burn the trash. Maybe not in the Big City but it was common around small towns and farms. Picture this… a 5 year old boy sent forth with a handful of kitchen matches, instructed to make fire. It could consume an ENTIRE morning!

kitchen matches and wall dispenser

First, the chore part.

I had to gather all the trash from all rooms in the farm house and outside waste bins, carry it across the drive to the corner of the big garden patch. There sat a rusty, sooty 55 gallon barrel. Of course, anything reusable had already been filtered from the trash… nothing with value or potential use gets thrown away on a farm.

Grandpa subscribed to the big city newspaper so there were stacks of them in the “junk room”, which was a wondrous dusty storage room on one end of the front covered porch, just beside the kitchen door. The walls were lined, floor to ceiling, with shelves full of jars of canned fruits and vegetables. Several guns were propped in the corner. Mouse traps lurked in the shadows. I’d grab some newspapers for “starter” and some matches from the dispenser on the kitchen wall.

Anyone who has watched the TV show Survivor knows that starting a fire and keeping it going are not as easy as it seems. It’s a skill. You can’t just throw some newspaper to the bottom of a barrel, dump trash in, light it up, and expect it to burn. No, it must burn fully. Completely. Only charred tin cans to fish out next time.

Every trash burner has techniques learned over time. How to stack different materials, to allow air flow. Ideally, a single match at one of the notches cut out of the barrel near the bottom did the job. Slow start, steady growing burn, complete incineration.

Some safety is also learned. A burn or two usually does the trick. But fire IS a temptress and unforgiving those with short attention spans.

large cast iron cauldron

About twice a year, Granny would make soap and ask me to build the fire for her.

Next to the trash barrel, she had a very large cast iron pot… of the witches brew variety (like in somebody else’s photo here).

The fire under it was made of mesquite and burned hot. It was a heavy, bulky, and dangerous arrangement.

She made lye soap. I don’t remember what all went into it — I wish I had the recipe — except you had to get it all boiling, stirring regularly with an old broken hoe or rake handle. For a day or so after, the concoction cooled into a light-yellowish solid. Somewhat soft, it was cut into wedges using a VERY large curved knife. The cut-up pieces were kept in a tote-sack in the junk room.

Aside from the crude nature of my grandmother’s method, I’m betting the making of many modern soaps isn’t really all that different. I could be wrong.

This soap was for washing laundry. She tossed a little chunk into each load when running the old washing machine that stood in a corner of the porch. Odd as it sounds, clothes came out smelling fresh and feeling wonderfully smooth. Most kids had a favorite patchwork blanket made by a bevy of loving relatives and/or church ladies at quilting bees. Each square of the blanket design cut from a cloth bag that bulk flour came in, and hand sewn. Your blanket became softer after every washing.

The feel was fine, the smell clean. Very different from burning the trash or making soap, where you went away reeking of smoke and sweat.

After playing with fire, kids HAD to take a bath before going to bed… so we could smell that favorite blanket when we went to sleep.