THE KITCHEN SINK

    I found a stack of stories I had written some time ago and I don't know if I put any of them in this blog so here goes.

   When I was growing up in the Coastal Bend town of Beeville, Texas, we lived sort of out in the country. "Sort of" because, as I may have explained before, we were only one-quarter of a mile outside the city limits but just far enough that I was referred to as a "country girl".

   We had a small one story wood frame house on 2 1/2 acres sitting right off the highway surrounded by what Mama called cemetery cedars, citrus trees and castor bean bushes. We had an indoor bathroom thank goodness, but it had only a tub, no shower, so washing hair was difficult. I had very long hair until I was about twelve (when the bat got tangled in my hair), so Mama always washed my hair in the kitchen sink. It was difficult because we had a single faucet for cold water and a single faucet for hot so she had to fill a pitcher with water of the right temperature and pour it over my head. That was a slow process and rather hard on my neck. 

   Lots of things went on in that sink. We had a garden so the vegetables were washed in the sink; we had chickens so after their necks were wrung, their feathers plucked and singed, they were cut up there. Sometimes Daddy would go to a cattle roundup and come back with the makins' of mountain oysters. For those of you who don't know what kind of seafood that is, it isn't. It's what you get after you castrate a bull. I wrote about this July 20th last year. They are quite tasty if you don't have the experience of watching your father clean them in the kitchen sink. They are cooked like fried chicken. He also liked to make cowboy stew so he cleaned the cow intestines and stomach in the same sink. 

   We always had a dog or two around the place and I remember washing the puppies in the sink if they got into something disgusting when the weather was cold. Otherwise they got an outdoor bath in a #2 washtub. Sometimes I did too when it was real hot which was a great deal of the time.

   We didn't have city water but had a well and a cistern so we had a septic tank right outside the kitchen window. A septic tank, for those of you who don't know, is an apparatus that sort of cleans the stuff that's flushed down the toilet or through the sink. It directed the used water from the house into clay sewer pipes which then directed the flow further out in the yard. Erma Bombeck was right the grass IS always greener over the septic tank.

   I just thought that someone should know about the sink activities at our little house in the 1940s. Daddy finally had a shower put in the bathroom but he still cleaned the guts in the kitchen sink.

This was published in the Victoria Advocate newspaper in November, 2005