On Making Soap

One of my first irrational fears came when I heard my Grandma Edna say, “Never touch a can of lye. When I was a little girl, a boy drank from a lye can he found in the farmyard and he could never talk again.”

I didn’t need TV horror movies. Stories like that put the fear of God into me.

The next time I heard about lye my mother was remarking that she was going over to Beatrice Henninger’s to make soap.

“How do you make soap?” I asked.

“Lye and fat. Mix them together and the reaction is soap. I have been saving fat from cooking for a while and the whiter it is, the better the soap. Beatrice is lucky. She has beautiful white fat from the farm. We are going to make the soap out in her back yard.”

I began to think of that little mute boy and worry that one of my younger siblings might eat the soap my mother was making out of lye.

Hand cut bars of soap came home the next week and were placed on a ledge by the wringer washer. Mother showed me how to use a paring knife to make soap shaving of soap to toss in the hot water. I could operate that thing by the washing machine by the time I was 10 years old, lifting the diapers out of the scalding water with a stick and running them through the rollers. There was a rhythm. First the water got washed the whites, then the same water, coloureds, then the darks.  I had to add a little hot water to top up the machine each time

I knew where the side touch release was should I get my hand caught in those rollers. Most of the time I used the release when the stick  to fish out the clothes got trapped in the rollers, or when the stick was raised with too many diapers and I was forcing them to all go through at the same time.

My hand still tingles when I think of getting it caught in the rollers, the blood gets pushed back toward my elbow until I could hit the release.

No brand of soap from the store made the clothes cleaner, my mother would say, when I would wish for store-bought soap.

Lucky for my fears, Wyora didn’t bring home any of the empty lye tins.

Arta