It was 1941 and my dad was in Gary to make money before finishing his schooling. He worked at one of the steel plants and he lived here. This is the address to which my grandmother mailed a letter in December of that year. I wrote about it in the post just below. Out of curiosity I looked it up on the Bing maps and here it is. Just a hop, not even add the skip and the jump from the Indiana Toll Road.

Of course, that road didn’t exist then – it was built when I was little and it went a bit north of my maternal grandparents’ house. The engineers rented a large room from my grandmother to serve as their field office. I used to ride my bike up to the overpass and watch the traffic go east and west. Just a rural girl leaning on the side rail – no need for chain link fencing then. I wanted to be in one of those cars. I actually did live in Sacramento for awhile, but I am back.

I lived in Palatine, Illinois also and Mother and Daddy drove over on that road and I drove to Scott on it. Not once did my father remark he had lived just that wee bit to the side.

I think it looked different then.

I belong to the early segment of Baby Boomers; we were lucky to have small town America mixed with the great spirits of the war being over. We were born knowing we had won. We reaped the benefits. My mother’s school was called into the gym on Monday, December 8,1941 to hear President Roosevelt’s speech. My father was driving back to Gary from having been in his hometown of Kingman, I don’t know who is was with, but I remember him saying he turned to the guy and said, “Well,  I guess we’ll be going soon.”

Six days later my grandmother mailed him a letter and in it you can hear the worry about the war and the tight times of The Great Depression. I think she had not yet grasped, however, just what a tremendous endeavor was looming.

Of course, he did go and he made his allotment out to her . . . and every time it came, she walked up to the bank and put it into an account for him  . . . for when he would come home. I once heard someone remark about still being able to see her making those regular trips.

I remember my dad teaching me to wash my hands; he taught my sons also. He was a big believer in not making yourself sick unnecessarily, and since he grew up before antibiotics, he wasn’t lackadaisical about it. I also brushed my teeth a lot too, but that is a different story in the same vein.

Anyway, I have always associated the aroma of soap with being protected, or watched over, or however you want to put it. Now I will get my hands filthy dirty right along with the best of them – including lying under my old MB300D fiddling with leaking lines and hoses. (May it rest in peace) However, when I go to get them clean, I want something that smells robust  . . . that takes five fingers and stamps C-L-E-A-N on them – and, yeah, the other hand too.

I do not use lavender scented soap by choice. And when it comes to scents like apple and strawberry . . . well, they’ll do in a pinch. Of course, you don’t get the psychic comfort out of the scent, but nothing’s perfect.

Two days ago I was in Wal-Mart to get softsoap refills and I saw there were some melon-scented bottles for 97¢. I figured at the rate we go through soap, I’d get a couple of bottles. Now I feel as if I have namby-pamby hands – the kind of hands that hang back when the slop jar spills.

Okay, we don’t have slop jars in my house now – but we have dogs and every now and then it gets a bit sloppy.

So I head for the serious stuff. Ironically, I don’t like the hand sanitizers. They smell like I’m going to have some medical procedure done; they don’t make me feel old-fashioned clean. My hair and the rest of my body can smell like apples or pomegranates, but darn it, I want my hands to radiate SOAP. It’s a quirk, I guess.