Of a well in the kitchen

The well was in the kitchen at the house that burned. There was a plaster facing around the bricks and a pulley suspended by a hook from a ceiling beam. A rope ran through the pulley. One end of the rope was attached to the bucket, the remainder of the rope wound around a piece of wood attached to the well frame so the rope would not fall into the well. The cover for the well was wooden and round. The bucket was not a normal round bucket with a wire handle, but a long cylinder made of sheet metal and an O at the top, connected to a rod that ran the length of the bucket and opened or closed a trap at the end, depending on whether you pushed the rod or pulled the O.

To draw water, you made sure the end was closed and then lowered the bucket. With its cylindrical shape, the bucket entered the water lengthwise until it was all the way in and water flowed in through the top. You could then pull up the bucket and position the end over whichever container you wanted to fill and pull the O, opening the end trap and allowing water to flow out.

With a normal style bucket, the rope was attached to the wire handle and the bucket always lay on its side when you lowered it to the water. Then, you had to jiggle the rope and the bucket until the bucket began to fill with water and then it would go under and be all the way full.

I remember the kitchen there as dark. I don’t remember any light, except for a little from a bare bulb in a socket attached to a wire than ran along a ceiling beam.

I remember my mother bathing my brother Bill in a dish pan. The pan was not the one she used for washing dishes in, but another one she used for bathing Bill and for some small pieces of laundry. The time I remember must have been 1951, when Bill wasn’t yet a year old.

Before the Army, every house I lived in had a well and a bucket and rope. Even the house at Rocky Branch that had running water and a bathroom inside – that house had a well and we sometimes had to draw water, when the pump went out or in hard freezes and we drained the pipes before the freeze so the pipes wouldn’t freeze and burst. One time, too, at that house, we had to draw water because the well was almost dry, and gritty water was in the pipes. Daddy hired a man who climbed into the well and dug out the sand and put the sand in the well bucket and Daddy drew it up and put it into a red wagon and then we put the sand in holes and low places in the yard. The man dug down as far as he could, and after a day we had enough water.
Momma and Daddy moved to Naples in 1967, while I was in Vietnam. The house in Naples was on city water and didn’t have a well.