Sometimes you just have an unusual train of thoughts while in the shower. Sometimes it’s a brilliant idea that later goes away because you don’t have time to write it down before leaving for work. Yesterday, I was thinking about how long this particular bar of soap had lasted. I started thinking about the soap we used when I was a child and how quickly a bar would be used up.
We were an Ivory house. Ivory Snow for the laundry. Ivory Flakes for hand washing “unmentionables.” And, then there was Ivory Soap. 99 and 44/100% pure. So pure that it floats! Actually it floated because it was whipped with air. It was about 35% air. That’s why an Ivory Soap bar the same weight as Palmolive or Dial was 50% bigger and had a score line so you could break it in half and actually hold it in one hand.
So pure that it floats! That led me to think of witches. In Colonial Virginia, witches were ducked. They had a seat on the end of a long pole. A suspected witch was strapped to the seat and dunked in the river. This was called a witch duck. If she was a witch, she would drown. If she was pure, she would not drown and would survive.
In the City of Virginia Beach, where I lived for six years when I was in my twenties, one of the major streets is Witch Duck Rd. In colonial times, this road wound its way down to the river where the witch duck was. I don’t think I need to explain what was at the end of Pleasure House Road.
