Dolby Days Genealogy

THE OLD RAIN BARREL
Told by Kenneth Martin - Written by Jodean McGuffin Martin
I wonder how many of you would think that there was a good story in a picture of an old "Rain Barrel?" How many of you ever saw a fifty gallon wooden barrel? Do you know what a fifty gallon wooden barrel was used for? Ok, I will give you credit for wiggle tails, you do know what they are don't you? At our house there wasn't many thing more precious to our life than water. There was never enough of it. You used it to wash dishes and then poured the dirty water out for the chickens. You took a bath in about four inches of water in a washtub and then used the water to keep Mom's Rose Moss flowers alive. We used that water so many times that it was plumb worn out by the time we finished with it. It was never carelessly thrown out, that would be sacrilegious. What water that we had in abundance was not palatable to humans and you might think that if humans couldn't use it that it wasn't important but let me tell you a story about the water, the cisterns, and the “rain barrel”. Dad had dug a well at the edge of our yard to have water for the animals on our farm. In this part of the country, the only water you could get in a dug well was gippy. It was bitter because of the gypsum in the soil. One mouth full left your mouth puckered for a week. If you have ever eaten green persimmons then you know what gyp water does to your mouth. You can spit it out and keep spitting but never get rid of the taste or the pucker. You'd swear to never taste it again. We had to use this gyp water for the cows, horses and chickens but they had to be starving before they would drink it. Humans didn't drink out of the well; we had a cistern for household use.

Cisterns and water barrels were part of the way we lived. The house had gutters that funneled the water into our cisterns. Sometimes the house had rooms added on to them and where the rooms met they made a channel for the water to run down to the ground. In this joint in the roof Dad would put an old cedar barrel to catch the extra water. Most of the time we kept the barrel covered with a zinc wash tub to keep out the dirt and mosquitoes. When it looked stormy, we let it rain on the top of the roof for a few minutes to wash off the dirt before we uncovered the cisterns and water barrel. If the wooden barrel was allowed to be without water in it, the cedar staves would dry out, shrink, come apart and the iron rings would drop off letting the barrel fall apart, so we were very careful to keep some water in it. There was lots of work just keeping this barrel to hold its supply of precious water. A water barrel is an ideal place for mosquitoes to breed. We'd lift off the washtub and find wiggle tails swimming in the water. If we had no water in our cistern, we used out of the rain barrel, wiggletails and all. It was a regular routine to strain our rainwater through a cloth before we used it to get the wiggletails out.

You are wondering how we kept from being sick? There were no insecticides, herbicides or fertilizers except what the farm provided. We built up tolerances to those germs that we lived with and became immune to others. Our milk was not pasteurized and we survived. Our water was not sterilized and we survived. That we outlived wiggletails in our drinking water, weevils in our flour, and castor oil for medicinal purposes is a miracle. I had three grown sisters and they guarded that rainwater barrel with their lives. That was their “beauty” barrel. The gyp water left their hair stiff and gummy. Ora and Dorothy were having boy friends and they had to have rainwater to wash their hair or be disgraced. Dorothy was sparkin with Roy Roberts and Ora's boy friend was Bill Roberts. I never did think those ole boys knew if the girl's hair was stiff or silky smooth. Those two "jellybeans" were so love struck that they had stars in their eyes and only marriage on their minds. I could see that real plain and I wasn't more than nine years old. They finally became my brothers in law. I just wonder if the girls ever told them how many fights we had when the wrong people used that wiggle tail water for something besides to wash their hair in it. I don't remember ever hearing it mentioned after they got married.

Anyway when I hear the word "wiggle tails" it brings back the days when our life was so simple. Today, with the progress of technology that the years have brought to us we think we are very modern and computer savvy--but you know what---we still have wiggle tails and when they make mosquitoes and bite us we still scratch.

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