forget "birth order", it's "bath" order that's important

Growing up in Kansas and Nebraska in the fifties there were times when water shortages required that bath water got used more than once. Yes, more than once by actual living people. And I'm not talking about grey water being saved to water the bushes out in the back yard either. This was before landscaping, before people cared whether or not their bushes lived.

The way the weekly bath worked was that generally the cleanest person, which was mom, would take a bath followed by dad and my older sister. I was the kind of kid who usually had been playing in the dirt, had snot runnning down and partially hardened on my upper lip and smelled like smoke because I was a firebug. Guess who went last? It really wasn't all that bad. Just wait long enough to let the bigger chunks of dirt settle down to the bottom from the last person, and then don't dip down too deep into the water when you rinse. The only thing I didn't like was stepping into and sitting down on that gritty bottom of the tub. I still remember that feeling today.

Sorry, no pictures to go with this one.