The Wash Tub, the Granny, and the Troll.
A friend was over a while ago, and we were working on the floor in my grandpa and grandmothers “Cozy Cabin”. We Needed some more light so we turned the ceiling light on for a while. The two bare bulbs filled the room with an obnoxious kind of light, and my friend asked me why I didn’t get a lamp shade for it. I told him it hadn’t had a lamp shade on it since I could remember, and I just liked it this way. I didn’t tell him why.
It was the summer of 1965, and mother was going to have back surgery that would keep her in bed for a month or more. My dad decided that the last thing mother needed was to have two energetic boys, ages five and six, pestering her so he decided that it would be best if we spent a month with my Grandparents. My brother Tom and I didn’t know our Grandparents very well at the time, they had come over to our house in the city last Christmas, but we hadn’t visited their farmhouse since we’d been babies. Now Grandpa and Grandma were both in their late sixties, and looking back, I’m not sure they really wanted to have two little hellions dropped in their laps, but Grandma welcomed us with open arms, fresh bread and our favorite meatloaf for dinner, so we thought she was neat-o. But Grandpa scared us, he was tall, very loud, he smoked like a chimney, and had to put his teeth in to eat dinner.
We found out two things about their little farmhouse: they didn’t have either a TV or running water. The first was a disappointment… no Lone Ranger and Tonto, the second was a positive shock. The bathroom was a little shed just up the hill and to the left, next to the shop. And water? That came from a spring about two miles up hill, and hauled around in five gallon metal milk cans. My brother and I thought that we were in one of the TV shows that mother liked… the Twilight Zone.
It was still light outside, and a couple hours until bedtime for two fidgety young men, so Grandma told us to go out and explore around the farm, just stay in sight of the house and we’d be fine. Oh, and BE CAREFUL. The shop had a lot of neat tools but it was the outhouse that fascinated us, for a while, then we went out into the little orchard. It had been a fairly dry spring, but the El Dorado of our exploration was to find the only mud puddle in miles. We were young, we were boys, and we were tired and cranky, so the only thing for our tiny minds to think of for further entertainment, was to have a wrestling match, in the middle of the mud puddle. Not even stopping to consider what other animals might have been in that mud puddle, or what they had done their.
It was getting dark when we were done, and since it dawned on us that we might be in a wee bit of trouble, we knocked on the back door instead of barging in. Grandma stood at the threshold looking down at two small mud pies on her back porch. She began shaking her head and with a small grin called out, “Grandpa, you’d better come see your Grandsons got into.”
When Grandpa came up to the door, with his gray hair standing almost straight up and without his teeth in… he looked just like a kid-eating-troll, I began to shake all over. He looked down at us and asked Grandma, ‘Anna, are you sure they’re ours?”
I asked “Are we in trouble?”
Grandma laugh, “No… your not in trouble, but you are in hot water, or a tub of hot water.”
Grandpa walked away chuckling, ‘I’ll get the wash tub, you get’em ready.’
Grandma told us sternly, “Peel. Go on and get your cloths off. No, no, right here. Don’t worry, no one can see you.”
We hesitated, mom would never have us undress outside in the city. But here? We started slowly, and then got into the spirit of the thing. It may have been the first time we ‘peeled’ on that back porch, but it wasn’t going to be the last.
It was a warm summer evening and by the time we were marched in, we had even more mud on us than before we peeled, we had been scraping it off our pants and playing catch with it.
We marched through the kitchen on newspaper laid down on the floor. In the middle of the living room, under those two bare bulbs, was a huge galvanized washtub half filled with water. Grandpa pointed and said, “BUTTS IN.“ Grandma handed us a bar of soap and an old fashioned sponge and said to start scrubbing. (Years later, I saw her still using the same sponge, and I just had to ask, ‘How long have you had that thing?’ She said, “Oh, since before the war“, “Which war Granny… 1812?”). We sat down in the tub, and Grandpa started pouring. Grandma kept encouraging us to ‘scrub harder’, which soon led to some splashing and giggling. Grandma’s quiet rebuke to ‘Stop Playing’, didn’t even slow us down. But the Trolls rumbling voice. “Now stop that, do you want to get water all over the floor!” After a while, it was pronounced that we had played enough, now stand up.
A gentle cascade of water came falling over my head, into the… muddy water in the tub… I mean it was dark. Two towels came out of nowhere and were quickly wrapped around us. The Troll asked “Anna you got that one? I’ll take this one.” With that the troll lifted me out of the tub and carried me over to his chair. He sat me in his lap and started drying me off. His gruff voice said, ‘Well, we got most of the mud off… although there’s still some in your ears boy.” I must have looked scared because in a gentle voice he said, ‘Don’t worry, your dad got mud in his ears when he was your age… hell I did too, a long, long time ago.”
The last thing I remember that night, is Grandpa wrapping the towel around me, and pulling me close. ‘Go on to sleep now boy. You gotta get some rest. There’s plenty of mud left out there for tomorrow.” I nodded off with a big fluffy towel around me, in the lap of the most frightening Troll I ever knew.
It’s been fifty years now, and in the age of the internet I could find a nice lamp shade to put over those two stupid bare bulbs… but every time I turn them on I can see this big old wash tub in the middle of the floor, and I remember Grandma and the Troll, and I fell a little bit better.
Daniel Harshman November 5, 2012