In My Day…Hot Water Bottles | Lynn Ruth Miller

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In my day, we didn’t waste our money on electric blankets or heating pads, no sir. We used the hot water bottle for everything. My momma filled it with boiling water and wrapped it in a towel to put in the bed before she gave me a bath. When I got between the covers, the sheets were toasty warm. In those days, the hot water bottle eased aching muscles and tummy aches and my momma used it on our boils and abscesses to get them to pop. And you know what else she did? She wrapped it in a towel and put it on her head when we gave her a headache, which was just about everyday.

And she even used it for that most hateful, horrible procedure…the enema. Back then, everyone believed you must have a bowl movement everyday, but nice children didn’t call it that. They called it number two. My momma didn’t want us to advertise our functions to the whole world, so she told us to call it number four.  We foured, the dog foured and if we didn’t like someone, we’d say “He’s full of four!” Every morning we would report our condition to our mother and if our answer was no, the next thing we knew we were lying on our bellies in the bathroom floor and she was administering warm soapy water from the hot water bottle into our posteriors. Today, I can’t see a hot water bottle without reaching for the toilet paper and thinking of my mother. And this is Lynn Ruth Miller with another addition of “In My Day.”