I can't remember how and when I became a washboard player, but I did... Hardiman bought me a brand-new medium one; I guess it's aluminum. I use metal fingerpicks and a metal thumbpick usually, but sometimes wooden thimbles. I play that one when I want as much volume as a bodhran player. *G*

A few years ago we went, for the first time since I was a small girl, up to the old family Adirondack cabin. The first part of the structure built was a tiny sapling-framed, clapboarded one-man cabin. We still have the diary entries made each day as the fellow built it, ordered by his doctor to head for the dry, cold mountains for his health, and his materials list includes the prices, ca. 1905 or 1907 (CRS). He got it done in time for the first winter, and he did get better. In a later year he had a bear encounter, and although he won the encounter, and had a newspaper photo of the loser to show for it, eventually the injuries got him.

"Camp" (as it was soon called) passed down to the father of three growing young men. The rest of the buildings followed, encircling the original cabin, as the place attracted more and more family members. The extended family would repair up to Camp each summer by wagon for a summer of upstate creek fishing, wild strawberry shortcake, and croquet in the large clearing that separated the cabin from the 55 wild acres surrounding it. By then a white enamel woodstove had been added in a real lino-floored kitchen, and I am sure it warmed the cold mountain nights, too.

Water all these years has been driven up from a large adjoining creek, by ram. It's no longer potable, but it's good for washing, and at some point that tiny original cabin section became a bathroom, complete with enameled iron claw-footed tub. There is JUST enough water pressure, from the small holding tank suspended outside the bathroom window, to get clean hair. *G* If you turn the pump on while you are in there. And you can handwash your "delicates" in that tub too, if you are feeling too anti-social to run down to the small town and its dingy laundromat.

In that tiny cabin live all the tools of Camp. So in addition to the nice tub and sink, there is the water heater, the tool shelf, the string for making a line to hang bathing suits, and every first aid item known to man from the last century. And all of the originator's tools are there, along with what has been added by each succeeding generation of tool users (male and female). They ain't decorations either, although I am sure there are restaurants, etc., that would love to get their hands on these items as decor.

So it was only natural that alongside the tub there hung, that year we came back to Camp, two washboards. One was a tiny tin one, about the size of a pice of legal-size paper. I played it one night and hung it back up. I must admit that I coveted it; but I gave no hint of it, or so I thought.

The day before we left, our cousin Francy, who now is the Queen of Camp, came to me, washboard in hand. She wanted me to have it, and in typical North-country fashion, little was said.

But I play it. Its tin-on-wood striking surface makes the most lovely sound as the strike echoes between the tin and the wood. And the wood slats are just loose enough-- shrunk with age-- to rattle every time it is struck. When I turn it over and use my palm on the wood, it gives a mellow, quietly-strong sound.

I like to think it belonged to Bert, the first occupant, who must have been mellow and quietly-strong himself, from the stories I've heard. I like to think that washboard was his small acknowledgement of the importance of maintaining at least a modicum of civilization as he became virtually a mountain man. No one knows for sure just when it turned up, you see. And me? I don't really want to know!

It fits just right in my smallest instrument case.

~Susan