KADDISHEL
A Life Reborn
weight hung from one end of the stick to weigh it down, and a pail hung from the other end. You would grab it and drop the pail down into the well. Pushing it down was hard, but bringing it up was easy because of the counterweight. Metal bars across the pail prevented horses from drinking directly from it. The well probably was not very deep, perhaps only six or eight feet. A more modern well had a bucket with a chain or rope that you could let down and bring up. There was a well with a pump in the center of town. A woman used to come and take the laundry to the river for washing. After she dried the laundry, she would put the towels and some of the linens through a mangle, which was three or four feet long and very heavy. She would lay the towel down on the table and roll the roller over it, then it would be pressed by going through the rollers. Finally, she folded it. Fine linens, like pillowcases, were ironed with a metal iron; the top of the iron could be opened and a hot coal placed inside. It worked quite well. We always raised large geese that provided lots of feathers. After they were slaughtered, a woman used to pluck them. She would sit outside and handle each individual feather to separate the goose down from the hard central quill, which she discarded. Then she would take the down to her home and stuff the pillowcases she sewed from fabric and zippers my mother provided. Every year, we had five or six new big square pillows. These pillows were part of the dowry when a daughter married, and were the finest that money could buy. When I came to America, I could not get over the fact that people here slept on such little pillows. I was used to pillows in Poland of at least double the size. I, of course, had to help out with chores. For big jobs, like pick- ing beans from the vines, my mother paid me. Our vines were trained to climb up long stakes, which my father brought from our lumber mill, making it easier to pick the beans off the plant. We stored these stakes in the shed during the winter. Sometimes my mother asked me to bring one or two friends to help pick beans and she paid all of us, which gave us an incentive to work. We played in the process and had a lot of fun.
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