Birthdays and Diapers

Earlier this week my older son celebrated his birthday. . Well did I remember, just as most mothers do, that January morning many (for both my son’s and my sake, we’ll leave it at many) years ago. The joy of my husband and parents, and the panic this nineteen-year-old new mom felt when the nurse plopped him in my arms. What next? I asked myself. I don’t know anything about babies. He was the first new baby I’d ever held.

The brave littlest cowboy. His mom
is the "bush" under the pony.

ur            A picture I found when I was sorting through old photographs reminded me of what next. The brave littlest cowboy perched on the back of a door-to-door pony. “Lady,” the fellow at the door had asked, “you got a kid who’d like a picture on my pony?” You don’t say no to an opportunity like that. After all, we lived high in the Texas Panhandle in Amarillo. Cowboying was part of our culture.

I asked how little a kid could be, mine was still not too steady a sitter. “Not a problem. You get behind the pony and hold him on.”

            “But I’ll be in the picture too,” I protested. “No’m, you won’t. I’ll scratch you out of the negative. You’ll look like a bush.”  He sounded slightly desperate. Chris and I were spending the afternoon at my mother’s house that was in an older neighborhood with very few children. The poor chap hadn’t had many takers that day, but he was in luck now, Mother and I bought a bundle.

            Now, looking at the picture I remember more. I remember that the cowboy hat and bandana made him look like a little man, but the rest of the outfit didn’t—diapers. Ah, I remember the diapers. Mostly I remember washing the diapers, and I remember drying them.

            We were student-poor. Bob was still in college, days and working the 4 to midnight shift at the telephone company. I’d stopped going to classes when I began to “show.” In those long-ago days we tried to hide the coming event—thank goodness, not the case now! I stayed home day and night with the baby and took one evening class on Tuesday while the entranced grandparents watched the baby.

            Not much money, translated to not many diapers—cloth naturally. Almost every day I washed diapers. My mother assured me how lucky I was to have a washer; she remembered doing them in the bathtub and stirring them around with a plumber’s helper. But I was not all that lucky; I didn’t have a dryer. I was the dryer. I lugged the laundry basket into the back yard and pinned the diapers (and all the other family laundry) on the seemingly endless clothes line. Then I lugged them back in. Okay. No big deal, and in windy Amarillo they dried so quickly in the summer that usually I could go back and start the take down as soon as I’d finished hanging them.

\           Not so in the winter when frigid air swept down across the plains straight from the Rocky Mountains. The first time I tried hanging them out—this would have been when the baby was about a week old—I ran into the house and called my mother after I went out and discovered that the diapers were frozen. Had I ruined them? We didn’t have money for more. Should I put them in the bathtub to thaw and then hang them a couple at a time on a chair near the floor furnace (my usual emergency drying spot)? I couldn’t hang them on the shower rod. This tiny house didn’t have a shower in its one bathroom. She calmed me down.

            “Lay them on the bed and forget about them for an hour or so, they are dry; they’re just frozen.”            I followed her instructions except for two I put by the floor furnace, because there were no more clean ones and the babe was begging for a change. As usual, Mother was right.  The next time we went to visit her, she had a surprise for me—a rack that fit over the furnace. I thought I was in the lap of luxury. I didn’t own a dryer until the third child was almost a year old—I didn’t know anything could make me so happy.

            Not only did the picture of the little cowboy remind me of these memories. I recently read a fine book Just Beyond Harmony by Gaydell Collier. (I’ll post a review soon.) She recounts her family’s adventure in the 1960’s when they lived in a log cabin in Wyoming for several years—Collier, her husband, and their four children. They had limited electricity and only enough running water for a tiny stream from the kitchen sink. For this time not only did she hang out the wash—she did it in a washtub with water she’d dragged from the nearby Big Laramie River. All year, and Wyoming winters are mighty cold. More than cold. Cold and snowy, and windy. When she told of bringing in the frozen laundry, I smiled and remembered my little cowboy’s diapers again. How lucky I had been with just one babe and a Panhandle winter, not  Wyoming one. And I hadn’t known it.