Tuesday, September 1, 2015

Gratitude (2)

So grateful for hot water.
Because we would be away for two weeks He decided to turn off the hot water and wrote himself a note to turn it back on again when we got home. We arrived at 1pm but the hot water heats overnight. No problem - the washing machine is happy to use cold water. A shower would have been nice - I'd skipped one in the morning as it was so cold in our caravan park cabin.
The kettle heated the water for a cuppa and even for a bit of washing up that didn't go in the dishwasher. But got me to thinking.
When I was a kid my Dad used to light the copper every Monday morning for Mum to do the washing. The copper was built in the corner of the laundry and the water bubbled away (yes, boiling water) and the washing was poked with a copper stick. On Saturday night Dad fired it up again and bucketed the rain water into the bathroom for us all to have a bath - one after the other. I had the luxury of first go since I was the youngest.
The rest of the week we had the flannel wash. Don't ask! For that we filled up a dipper from the hot water 'fountain' over the kitchen sink and carried it to the bathroom basin. Imagine a primary school age kid carrying hot water through the house. I also remember an old friend telling me that during the dislocation of the 1950s flood she kept herself clean for a whole year using basin washes.
In our big old house in Laura we had a wood stove. It was quite nice to light it in the winter afternoons so the kitchen was warm when the family arrived home from school. I would put the kettle on and often thought how it would have been when that was the only way to boil the kettle and how horrid it would be to have to heat the woodstove and the kitchen in summer just to get a cup of tea.
So this morning when I got up and ran the hot water tap, how glad I was to have hot water so easily and the shower was wonderful.
I was just really glad He didn't turn off the water bed as well. We had two very cold mornings in caravan park units so to come home to a cold bed - that would have been the end.