Many people of my grandparents’ generation lived on farms away from towns with industries and stores. My grandparents were of this ilk. They lived pretty much self-sufficient lives with little money to spend, save what little they got for products raised on the farm. They used the money to buy things they could not produce on the farm: flour, salt, sugar etc. Dad’s folks raised sheep in the hillside pasture for their wool for making clothes and quilts. They had a blacksmith shop for iron product needs. I never witnessed any woolen operations or blacksmithing work, but I did see Grandma Wells make soap one day.

Grandma brought out an oval cast iron vat about a foot wide and two or three feet long. She built a fire in a prepared place, set the vat over the fire and poured some water into the vat. She disappeared for a few minutes and returned with buckets filled with an awful looking mess that turned out to be grease and pieces of pork rind. She emptied the buckets of the chaotic mess into the vat, stirred it, added a couple cans of lye and went to do something else while it came to a boil. As the mixture heated and boiled, the pork skins began to disappear. Once they were gone Grandma picked up a chicken feather and dipped the end of it into the soup. Part of the feather was missing when she removed it. She repeated the test a few times until she retrieved the feather whole. She then doused the fire and let the soup cool. When she came back to the vat it had cooled and [viola!] a layer of brownish yellow soap lay on top of the soup. She cut the soap into bars and set them aside to cure, while the soup in the vat retained all the useless stuff including solid waste. Now, instead of a chaotic mess, she had a usefu1 product.

As I think back on this incident I see the greasy mess as a society in chaos, having no rules and no discipline. The lye, though harsh, is a set of values and morals from God.