Okay, I don’t know why there is a photo of a motorcycle in a desert at the top of this OP, but ignore it. That is all.
Ever since I first heard about the panic buying of toilet paper, this has been going around in my head. I finally remembered what I was thinking of.
Who remembers the PBS series Frontier House? It set up three different families as 1883 homesteaders in Montana as a kind of social experiment to see what it would really have been like. Little House on the Prairie it wasn’t.
Anyway, one thing that stuck with me over the years was how one family dealt with outhouse needs – the mom designated a separate rag for each family member, hung them on separate hooks, and let us use our imaginations for the rest.
Gross? Yes. Better than your hand? Yes.
I didn’t go back and re-watch the whole thing to find where that scene showed up, but here is the first episode – around 35 minutes in you see the one mom talking about smuggling in makeup, and then my heroine talking about smuggling in toilet paper.
It’s an amusing anecdote, and one so apropos to today.
Given that in the series they were washing their ‘toilet paper’ out by hand periodically and re-using, is it really that big of a deal for us to do the same and run them through the wash?
If our current world situation were the subject of a documentary or social experiment and we had time to sit back and think about what is the most important supply to stock up on, what would that supply be?