A SOAP OPERA

There it was, an image too long in my memory: a tall Mason jar filled with narrow slivers of once-white soap, an unattractive display of objects exposing my father’s parsimonious nature. I got rid of this family heirloom after my father died, but the jar remained in its place on the bathroom sill much longer than I wanted to see it, a vessel holding dried-out, cracked pieces of a soap that supposedly floated in bath water.

The sight of those slivers of soap reminded me of the soaping up my birth family and I did when we bathed in the Colorado River under a bridge in Austin, Texas. That soaping up was one of the few baths our family took during a three-month camp-out en route to California during the 1940s. The soap was a large bar of Ivory, and it remained the soap of the day for the Marquart family as long as I lived under my father’s roof and rule.

Postcard of Bridge over Colorado River at Austin

However, my Grandmother Nell preferred orange-colored Lifebuoy soap and forced Grandfather Paul into a claw-footed tub once a week where she scrubbed him briskly, fussing all the while about having to kill germs that lurked on my ailing grandfather’s skin. During summer visits, she’d also use that same orange bar on me every afternoon following my nap. The scrubbing occurred so that I’d smell clean enough to visit the “garage,” or Motor Sales and Service where my grandfather sold Ford automobiles and black grease abounded. So much for one of Grandmother Nell’s contradictions!

I admit to succumbing to soap scents dating from childhood and have collected special bars such as those smelling of fresh citrus, candy, and cinnamon that have been wrapped in crinkly cellophane or placed in decorative boxes. I’ve put those bars in bureau drawers, on closet shelves, and sometimes under pillows. The soaps are acknowledgments to ancient Babylonians who in 3900 B.C. created special soaps they used for cleanliness and health. It seems that soap has been a bath essential a lot longer than my father’s old collection of Ivory slivers.

I’ve often considered making soap, but the idea of using lye in processing prevents me from doing anything other than buying new scented bars in special boxes and wrappings that others have made.

Perhaps these special bars of soap would have been an affront to my father, who preferred the pure white bars of Ivory, but when an image of those dried-up slivers in a jar enters my mind, I mentally dispose of it again...and hastily open a new box of cucumber soap.