We drew our water home by hand

My cousins Terri, right, and Denise, goof off in the 1970s around our backyard hand pump that went from having been an ordinary kitchen utensil to becoming a symbol of home before it disappeared this year. (Scott Beveridge photo)

By Scott Beveridge

WEBSTER, Pa. ? The old cast-iron hand pump in our backyard wasn?t there for decoration in the 1960s.

We needed that contraption to draw water for drinking, cooking and the bathtub, especially on those long, hot July and August summer days when the rain-fed cistern had run dry.

Our obsessive-compulsive dad was especially cranky during dry spells and often would grumble about the expense of water at the kids who dawdled too long over an open sink faucet.

?Running water is gold down the drain,? he?d bark, repeating a phrase rattled by his father during the miserable Great Depression.

It?s impossible, now, to imagine our having relied upon the water that pump supplied to us in our scrappy village along the Monongahela River in Pennsylvania.

No one apparently had told our grandpap it was a bad idea for him to dig the nearby hole for the outhouse directly upstream from the spring that feed the pump. Needless to say the family?s privy would soon contaminate that pump water. It would take a few more years for the local board of heath to determine the folks in Webster needed to boil their spring water to destroy an E. coli it contained.

It?s even harder to imagine that my two brothers and I, - the youngest then a toddler  - had bathed in that water on those days when water conservation was a high priority in our home.

We were dropped into recycled bathwater, which was first used by our parents in the tub mom would then top off with a teakettle or two heated to a boil on the kitchen stove.

The county soon constructed a few new nearby public springhouses, however, the water they spewed proved to have been polluted, too, by outhouses. And then public water was brought to town, rendering useless the our neighborhood hand pumps, underground water storage tanks and outdoor facilities.

Yet mom would onto the pump that had stood a stone?s throw from our back porch since the late 1800s. She found a section of a round concrete underground street drain about 18 inches long, and planted on its side it at the base of that pump she had painted fire engine red.

Mom then filled the turned up drain with dirt to create a planter in which she nurtured beds of hens and chick and morning glory perennials interspersed with pretty annual flowers.

Soon the dry pump morphed from having been an ordinary household utensil into a family landmark that represented home.

Young cousins dressed in their best clothes for church on Easter Sunday would prouldly stop beside that pump to pose for family photographs. Others spent the summer afternoons of their awkward teen years dancing around that pump hoping to attract the attention of potential suitors.

Relatives grew older and moved on. Still dad and mom kept their pump freshly painted, alternating its color between forest green and white, until they died in 2007 and 2010, respectively.

The other day I went looking for that pump, almost ten months to the day after their estate had fallen into limbo. I was looking for closure.

But the pump had disappeared like a late autumn rose snitched from its thorns before the first frost of winter.

Source: http://scottbeveridge.blogspot.com/2011/04/we-drew-our-water-home-by-hand.html

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