Monday, April 21, 2008

The Coal Shed

I'm sure that the reason I took this picture was the barely discernible kittens in the foreground, but it is a good picture of the newer coal shed (the old one was open, with the sides being made of slabs with the bark still on), the round tub on the side, the oblong tub on the ground (?), and clothes drying on the clothes line. That round tub was the one used for years for the Saturday night job of bathing in front of the kitchen stove. The pump is over by the fence.

2 comments:

Judy said...

Look at the wind blowing the clothes on the line. White clothes went through wash first and then on to darks, all in the same water. And the whites would often be dry and ready to come off the line before the later batches went up. There was plenty to do and wash day required all hands. Pictures like this tell more than you might think.

Ann said...

What an amazing picture. The laundry hanging on the clothesline reminds me of the years when we would hang out the wet laundry on a very cold day, and then bring in the frozen clothes from the line, stand them up around the stove and wait for them to thaw so we could finish drying them in the house.
Looking at the new/old coal house and seeing the kittens in the foreground makes me wonder if these were the kittens that Steve and I hid in the coal house to keep them out of the cold weather. I never could understand why the kittens couldn't live in the house.
If you look to the right of the coal house, going back towards the corner fence post, that is the place where, in the winter, Steve, Judy (I think) and I would dig out our skating rink. Dad had an old pair of ice skates and we always wanted to go ice skating, so Dad told us to make an ice skating rink. We would dig out as much as we could so we could build a ridge around the edge of our rink. Then we would haul buckets of water from the pump over and dump the water into our rink. Needless to say, very little of the water stayed on top of the ground, but I suspect Mother and Daddy were delighted knowing that we were occupied for several hours trying to make it work.
Looking to the left of the coal house, over on the church lots, is where we would go and dig our "holes" for playing with the trucks and little cars we had, and where we tried to dig to China so Mother couldn't find us. It was always a battle between the ticks and the ants, but we were not to be deterred from our mission.