Page 14 RAIN October 1976 Pioneering Communities, continued mother and baby made comfortable, usually a day or a.little longer. Then other women or girls took over. The n~w mother was always kept in bed 10 days after h~r baby was born, and . that is the natural way to protect her health. Ofcourse all . .· women nursed their babies. But in the rare case whe·n she couldn't nurse, a goat was brought and the baby thriveq ~n goafs milk. I remember when my second brother was born I stood by and watched the midwif~ take care of the baby. She explained to me .everything she was doing, washing the . baby, oiling him with olive oil, taking care of the navel arid putting on the band around his belly to hold the navel in place· and finally handing the squalling little squirmer·to his mother · for sustenance. · · · . Mama baked tWice a week, bread inade with the y~ast in the jar she kept on the back of the range, cakes, pies, all kinds of · goodies. In those days when a girl was married he.r inother gave her.a yeast starter, and this would last indefinitely under the right circumstances. It was a tragedy if one's yeast died. Into this jar of perpetuality Mama poured the water from boiled potatoes. We now had three cows. Two were milking at all times, while one was dry. The milk was kept in stone crocks in the milk house. When it was sour Maina skimmed off the : cream from the top and churned it. She had a barrd-shaped churn with a crank. You turned the barrel untilthe cream separated and one part became butter. You took this out and pressed it together, washed out the excess milk, and formed . .it with a mold. The otherpart in the churn was buttermilk. The clabber in the crocks became cottage cheese, that is some of it did. The rest, and the buttermilk we did not drink, was fed to the pigs. Cottage cheese is made by heating (not boiling) the sour milk untilthe clabber coagulates. Then you skim it out, tie in a clean rag, and hang up over night. Next day you mix the curds with sour cream and whatever ·seasoningsyou want. The whey is given to the piggies. Don't waste anything; that was the watchword. And nothing was wasted. All has its use. Animals like the tops and peels from vegetables~ corn stocks, some fruit peels (apples). A good morning meal for growing pigs is scrub potatoes cooked over an outsidefire and served warm in cold weather. You can add potato peelings and apple peelings to this stew, anything else that's handy and not poison. Washing machines were not yet invented, nor refrigerators. Mama washed clothes by boiling on the range or outside in a copper boiler, then she scrubbed them out on a washboard. Most people kept food in a cellar. But meat had to he smoked or salted to be stored. But we had a sewing machine. That Singer is still in use in my sister's house. We took Saturday baths in the same tubs Mama washed·the · ·clothes in. The hot water was taken from the reservoir un the side of the range. It was my job to fill that reservoir every day, carrying in buckets of water from the pump on the porch. I also carried in toris of wood from the woodshed off the back porch: (It was the cabin Dad built first.) We had a telephone on which line there were some umpteen subscribers. It sometimes took you a while to get a call through because somebody was always on the line. Early one day in · ·the spring there came an emergency call. One short ring always . meant dear the line, an important call coming through. Then ·the i-ing. It was ours! Why? Don't ask me. But when Dad answered, there was a battery of receivers down and the call was: San Francisco is burning. There has been a terrible earthquake. Many homeless. What can you give? Wayside (place at the side of the road) what you can and teamsters will pick it up. It was spring, nothing had been produced yet. All we had to spare were a few bushels of potatoes in the bin that had weathered the winter. Those Dad took to the roadside. After the disaster there were a great number of homeless children, and these were offered for adoption..You had to pledge to treat the child as y<;)Ur own, to send it to school arid keep it ·. in good health. You also had to be ofgood character. We did . not put in for adopting, but some others did. Donaldsons had three boys, so did Carneys, and each opted for a girl. Donald~ sons got a girl named Jenny, about 15, and Carneys a girl · named May, aged about 8. The Carneys showered their girl with everything, and I loved to play with her because she had so many toys. May also had two fathers. Her real dad hadn't been killed, but he put herup for adoption. We all sort of . envied a girl who had eve.rything., even two papas. . You might think that people who worked as hard as they. did wouldn't have time for fun. But, to the contrary, almost · anything was cause for celebration. Weddings called foi" a · chivauri (I am not sure I spell it right) and a dance and a giving of presents. Christmas was a big time, with parties at various · houses, exchange .of gifts, and a play given .in the school house. This usually was children acting out the manger scene. And a big Christmas tree with everybody under 18 getting a big bag of goodies. · · · Iri all it was a community well organized and hardly ever a bad dispute. Nobody knew how much money you had; it wasn't important. It was something one forgot until the rare times when it might be needed. But if you didn't have it it wasn'.t a necessity. And I think that may be why those old days were so good.· · · (SEWAGE ) Septic ·rank Practices, Peter Warshall, 1976, $2.50 from: · Clean Water, Leonard A. Stevens; 1974, $10 from: E. P. Dutton & Co. 201 Park Ave., So. New York, NY 10003 Biological Control of Water Pollution, Tourbier and Pierson, 1976, $20 from: University of Pennsylvania Press 393 3 Walnut Stre.et Philadelphia, PA i9174 The use of natural systems for sewage treatment requires unique design for different situations..Although prohibitively priced, this collection of concise papers prov1des an extremely useful survey of international projects employing diverse biological treatments-reeds, tid:!.l marshes, aquaculture, algae and forests to effectively treat sewage. (TB) P.O. Box 42, Elm Road Bolinas, CA 94924 Careful description of the benefits of staying with ·small-scale on-site sewage treatment rather than going to collection systems; Explains design, construction, care and maintenance of on-site systems. Demonstrates that on-site systems can be designed for almost any site if system·is designed for site condi-: tiorts rather than allowable site conditions being determined by design of standard manufactureq systems. Excellent bibliography to more technical or detailed studies. (TB) A historv and survey of numerous interesting programs of applying sewage to farm and forest land. Covers projects designed for water recovery, agricultural production, sewage disposal and economics. Explores effectiveness and safety of various processes, but doesn't deal with the problems of heavy metals in sewage of cities that haven't yet instituted recovery systems to keep such valuable and dangerous materials out of the sewage. An appendix .gives location of land treatmen-t systems worth visiting. (TB)
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