Saving Water

Reading on the Internet, I came across a post by a woman who had attempted to save water by hand-washing her dishes.  To her dismay, she wrote, rinsing each dish under a faucet of running water actually used more water to clean the dishes than the dishwasher did. She gave up the idea.

Well, Honey, that ain’t how it was done. Having grown up in a household that depended on a cistern for water, I knew every trick in the book for saving water, and had I not used them, my mother and Grandma Alice would have scolded me severely.

I knew I could “fill” my bath with two inches of water, part of which I heated in a teakettle on the kitchen stove. Our old Maytag washing machine in the basement was filled just once each week with water, also heated on the kitchen stove, and used to wash everything in the laundry. No refills. We rinsed the laundry in a separate tub, filled with cold water. This water, too, was used to rinse the entire laundry. No refills. 

And when it came to dishwashing, we used two dishpans that hung on nails on the kitchen wall, one for washing, and the other for drying. We heated two kettles full of water on the stove, and poured some into each dishpan. We washed in one, dunked the dish in the other and handed it to the person who was waiting, dishcloth in hand. ready to dry and put the dish away. So, that’s how it was done. There was no running of water over each dish. They all went into one dishpan full of water.

The dishpans were enamelware, like this one offered on eBay for $16.95.

The general principal was to wash the cleanest things first, and so on down the line until only the dirtiest remained. For example, first wash the glassware, then the tableware, then the plates and bowls, and finally, the pots and pans. In the case of laundry, first wash the white things such as white shirts, sheets and pillowcases. Then bath towels, followed by colored dresses, shirts and underwear, then Dad’s work clothes and, finally, rags. My friend Yvonne’s family, who lived in the country, even extended this principle to bathing the family, from cleanest to dirtiest, in a round galvanized tub on their screened-in back porch in summer and by the wood-burning kitchen stove in winter.

Every drop of water was used, you see, until it was too dirty to use. Even then, we carried the used dishwater outside to pour on the flowerbed by the back door.  Our gutters were equipped with a moveable spout, and when rain came, Dad let the first few minutes go by to wash off the roof, then went outside to switch the spout to drain into our cistern.  That was our water supply and we hoarded it until the next rain.

                                                                                                        

Want to give that life-style a try?

Copyright 2018 by Shirley Domer