2025, Family, home, Nature, Uncategorized

Salty Water

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Unless you got your water from a well back in Dickinson, no one needed a water softener. Our city water came from the Missouri River, and had just the right amount of minerals and wasn’t too hard. You didn’t need a special tap and faucet for drinking water

I had forgot that back here in Rock County, everyone has a water softener, as the water is very hard. The people we bought the house from were kind enough to leave us several bags of softener salt. The kitchen is plumbed so that our drinking water comes through the refrigerator door/icemaker. It is going to be tedious to fill up the tall pasta pot with water from the fridge door. I also have to get used to feeling as though I didn’t get all the soap off when I take a shower.

There were two guys in town with the same last name of Frakes who both were friends of my dad. One ran the Culligan franchise, so dad called him “Softwater Frakes”. The other was a building contractor named Marion who was married to a woman my dad called “The Devil’s Grandmother” due to her fussy and irascible temperament. I think of them now every time I drive passed the Culligan shop.

What are your favorite songs and stories about water and the sea. Anyone who you know who could be the Devil’s Grandmother?

57 thoughts on “Salty Water”

      1. I had to look. La Mer was written (with French lyrics) in 1945 by Charles Trenet and later adapted to English and the Bobby Darin version.
        Charles Trenet:

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    3. This is one of those songs I can’t quite trace to the first time I heard it. I always loved it, though, whoever performed it. Maybe I first heard it at MacCafferty’s back in the day.

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  6. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    After thinking a while, I may have more of these. There was one from TLGMS about moon on the water I really loved.

    My mother was the Devil’s Grandmother. What a difficult person she was–and she was Always Right. The last 2 years have been a great relief.

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  12. I knew a lady who could have been the Devils Grandmother. She was the mom of my brother-in-law, so I didn’t have much to do with her, but she was just mean.
    Talking with my siblings, and we’ll discuss one of our Grandma’s or an Aunt and we all have different opinions about them. I was scared of Judy, but the rest liked her. And Mom always talked so nice about Mom Hain, but the kids didn’t. they thought she was grumpy.

    In other news, Krista, I postponed concrete. I just couldn’t do it. Didn’t help I was sick all weekend and didn’t get done what I needed to get done.
    Sigh-
    I still need to get it done, before it freezes, because the concrete can’t freeze for the first week or so.
    now I’m not sure when.
    Oh well!

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  13. I can only think of one person who would qualify as a devil’s grandmother. She was a coworker. She was just simply obnoxious. She was loud, uncouth, hyperactive, and rude. I trained her in, and at first, she was fine. She honeymooned for several months. I even liked her. As time went on, she became intolerable. She would jabber endlessly and loudly about herself, and interrupt and talk over other people. She was argumentative about everything, detested minorities, said that George Floyd “deserved it,” declared disgust about “hippies” and environmentalists, and voted for the orange one. She gave us all a headache, and everyone said they left feeling exhausted when she was at work. I really think she could be a nice person if she thought for one second about the feelings of others, but apparently she never found that moment of thought.

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  14. I remember having to go to an outside faucet to get a pitcher of water if my grandmother came for lunch. She didn’t like soft water. I never understood that, but water outside does taste better. Maybe because it’s from a hose!

    We’re lucky at hour house, we have well that’s only 140′ deep. It always tests good, but it wouldn’t be allowed anymore. Now they go 300+ feet deep and that water is hard and full of iron. And tastes terrible.
    And I have never liked ‘city’ water. Must be the chloride?

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      1. I did a search for the song “The River and the Sea” by Ruth MacKenzie and came up empty. It’s from the play 10 November. I’m going to see it this weekend.

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        1. Oh. My heart breaks. I was in a production of that way back when at the Rep Theater in town. We were going to do it again in 2021… alas, Covid happen.
          I found this promo which makes me sad happy.

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