How do You Like your New Faucet?

a family tale by SGHolland

We were in the kitchen not long ago, my daughter and I, and we were discussing her decisions about whether to replace her sink faucet.

We both began smiling at about the same time.

I said “ ‘Mom…’ “

And she finished the sentence… “‘ …how do you like your new faucet?’ “

This was a recurring family token of love, I guess you could call it, or a sort of anthem.

It was about 1966 when we all were living in a really antique (1770’s) farmhouse in the Valley Forge general area of Pennsylvania. We rented it for $80 a month!! It was where my kids really did their first growing up. There was plenty wrong with that house, and plenty that was just right.

Here’s the house as it looks today, but when we lived in it, the fieldstone walls were whitewashed, the shutters and porch painted black, and there was a “summer kitchen” and rendering nook off to the right.

We loved that place, all of us for different reasons.

The kitchen, at the right end of this “double house”* had the original huge fireplace with a big arm that carried pots over to the fires that used to burn back in the olden days. The fireplace was covered with double doors and closed with a wood slat. The chimney was blocked up for safety’s sake; a plain old electric stove in the kitchen next to the sink. The floors had been linoleum-ed, but beneath was the original wood, warped by many feet so that a marble placed on the floor on the way into the kitchen would roll back and forth between the table and chair legs many lazy times before it came to rest under the table.

The artesian well in back supplied the most delicious water in the world. That well, with its little well-housing where repairs could be made to the new-fangled engine (no more pump handle) that drew up the water, icy cold and lignite clean! That clean water came to a old-time porcelain kitchen sink with a sort of decripit spiquot arrangement that had needed replacing for a long time. It took a special trick to keep it from dripping.

Crown Jewel

THEN came the day when the landlord came and brought a shiny , brand new, modern faucet for the sink. A red letter day!

It was like a crown jewel there in the middle of that large room — the middle of our family doings as it undoubtedly had been for many families before us.

Every day we gloried in that new faucet. And when the kids would see me there using it, they would stand by me watching and saying, always, and often, “Mommy, how do you like your new faucet?”

I mean they said it often. And then we would all rave about the wonderful, magical new faucet. And laugh and laugh.

Even a year later, and a year later than that. It got to be a family saying — a sort of peon to miracles in the kitchen and all things bright and shiny and brand new. We said it whenever we moved to a new place! We said it when we moved to Washington State from Pennsylvania.

This practice has held over the years (count them…from the 1960’s to the 2017's!) so that now and then one of my kids will pop up with that and we all get a surge of old-time family bonding that has been carried by those very words.

I am sure we will mention the new faucet wherever we go. No matter which of our more or less modern kitchens we are gathering in.

SGHolland ©2017