Taking a bath or shower is a way of life for all of us. As kids, Tim and I certainly had our share of tub time. When we were very young, we sometimes took baths in a washtub on the porch. I do have of picture of this, but I can’t post it because one of us isn’t “decent” in the picture. I’m surprised that they even developed it in those days!  

 

When we were older, we graduated to the real tub in the upstairs bathroom. In those days, I liked to take bathes. Usually, Tim and I would take baths together to save hot water and to double the fun. On most occasions, usually in the winter, we would run out of hot water. Our mother would get some big pans and heat the water on the stove and pour it into the cold or lukewarm water in the tub. We took many baths in lukewarm water in those days. I have an 80 gallon water heater. I’m not about to run out of hot water now! One thing I looked forward to at bath time was playing with the cool bath toys we had. I don’t recall us ever having the classic bath toy for kids, a yellow rubber duckie, but we had cooler things than that. My favorite was a wooden cabin cruiser boat that had an outboard motor that worked on a battery! It had a real canvas top as well. We would turn it on and it would sail around the inside edge of the tub. It also had navigation lights that worked. On the port side was a red one and on the starboard side was a green one.  One of the most fascinating things about this boat was that the lights and the motor would still work even when it was under water! We also had a ship that was made out of steel. Its bow was bent and had a small crack in it and would sink shortly after putting it in the water. It looked a lot like the Titanic, which would explain why it always sank. Other times, I would merely let a flat sponge float around and pretend it was a raft. When we weren’t playing with bathtub toys, we would turn the narrow faucet on and put our thumb over it. This would result in a small stream of water shooting out the right side through a small crack about an inch or so from the bottom.

 

These were the days before Mr. Bubble. In order to take a bubble bath, we would hold the bar of soap under the stream of water from the faucet. It worked best if the soap was just below the surface of the water. After a short time, we had all kinds of bubbles to play around with and break. We always used Lux bar soap for baths. Once in a great while we used Lifebuoy (probably when it was on sale). I never cared much for it. The main reason why is that whenever we said “bad words”, that was usually the soap we got our mouths washed out with! I don’t even know if they still sell it now days, but I never will use it! It must have worked, because to this day I still don’t use any “dirty words” or swear! Another reason I don’t is that I’ve always considered using such language beneath me and would lower my self respect. Additionally, as a result of years of observation, I’ve found that people swear and use “dirty words” to try and impress their peers as a result of feeling inferior and insecure and to blindly “follow the crowd”.  Good grief, I’m really getting more vocal in my old age aren’t I! Well, moving right along…

 

As previously mentioned, as young children, Tim and I always took our baths together. Since we were usually very dirty from our exploits during the day, we left a heavy duty bathtub ring behind. Although I rarely take baths anymore, preferring the shower, when I do take a rare bath, I don’t recall ever seeing a bath tub ring. I don’t know if it’s due to the modern soaps, or more than likely, I’m not as dirty as I was when I was a kid. Probably what Wisk has done for ring around the collar, the newer soap formulations have done to prevent bathtub rings.

 

As opposed to better soap these days, the shampoos were definitely better back then. I remember the advertisement for Prell shampoo. They demonstrated how thick it was by dropping a pearl in it and it slowly went to the bottom. The lather from Prell was very rich and thick. A while back, I bought some Prell thinking it was still rich and thick. I found it to be thin and hard to get the same thick lather we got as kids. If you dropped a pearl into it now, it would sink to the bottom so fast that it would no doubt break the sound barrier.

 

One interesting phenomenon we experienced as kids was that after we got out of the tub, our fingertips were always all wrinkled. I never knew what caused this, and as a got older, this has not happened since.

 

We usually visited our Grandmother Arlie on Sundays. Tim and I would always take a Sunday night bath if there were school the next day. In the summer, we rarely took baths there. She had an old claw bathtub and the best thing about it was there seemed to be an unlimited supply of hot water! She always used aqua colored Zest soap. We liked it because it always made us feel really “clean”. Why we didn’t use it at home remains a mystery. Probably one reason why Lux soap never made us feel this way was due to our very hard well water.

 

On one occasion, I took a bath with both my undershirt and underpants on. Why did I do this? I have no idea. I suppose I did it just for the fun of it. Very few things I did as a kid were based on logic or rationality. Come to think of it, on some occasions, the same thing goes for me as an adult too! Oh well, it makes life interesting and not boring. I have always tried to avoid “mindless ruts” and doing such things as the aforementioned keeps life interesting and fresh. From childhood on, I have always “marched to the beat of my own drum.” The drumhead has always been “wrapped too tight”, however.

 

When we became teenagers, we of course took baths by ourselves. As we grew, it became more and more difficult to fit in the tub. I used to lie down under the water to get warm in the winter and as I got older, I couldn’t do that. The old original tub is still around. Tim has used it for a cattle water trough the last several years. It even seems smaller now. When I look at it, which is everyday since I pass it to do horse chores, I wonder how we managed to take a bath in it when we were bigger. I even wonder how Tim and I both fit into it as small kids!

 

Related Story Link: (This is my all time CLASSIC story!)

A “SNAP” DECISION (Page down one story to read it. This was written in the early days of my stories and is much shorter).