252hipster movement. All this media
attention about conserving
water and showering in non-
peak hours—we’d been doing
that since the seventies. It wasn’t
weird to us because Nan Torti—
my dad’s mother, who lived in the
city—didn’t even have a tub. She
had a double-basin kitchen sink
in an old wartime house in Eagle
Place where she had “bird baths.”
And Nan Torti was a scrumper
before I even knew such a term
existed. Scrumping is the act
of foraging for windfall fruit or
helping yourself to leftover, left-
behind veg in a farmer’s field. It’s
stealing with pseudo-permission.
Nan Chapin (again, that’s
my mom’s mom, in case the
family tree branches are getting
tangled in your hair) had built
a house in the mid-1980s and
went for a luxury spa bath. It
was her treat for enduring a
24-7 pig-manure existence on
their farm. My grandfather
showered downstairs in a stall
by the chest freezer (full of
Deep’n Delicious cakes) while
Nan had a “Calgon, take me
away” experience upstairs in
the palatial master bath with
whirlpool tub and bidet. We never
really knew what the bidet was
for, but if you cranked it just so,
you could make the water hit the
ceiling, and that was great fun.
And if my grandfather was on a
hunting or fishing trip with the
guys, we took turns sleeping over
with Nan. We never had to share
bathwater at Nan’s, even though
she had a well too.
My great-grandmother had a
proper bath and shower, but we
never, ever used it. What I can tell
you is this: for all the years that
she was alive, she was dedicated
to the Zest brand. There was
always, always, always a bar of
Zest soap on the bathroom sink.
To this day, a whiff of Zest and
I can hear her cackling away on
the party line (which, for those
under forty, was like a conference
call before conference calls
were invented).
So what was normal? A bird
bath or a bath with someone
else’s picky shaving stubble and
Palmolive residue? In elementary
school you didn’t tend to talk
about baths at recess.
Everything else was normal.
I’d enrich my word power
thanks to Reader’s Digest. Kiley
and I would freak ourselves
out (usually on a weekly basis)
looking at my mom’s big red
health encyclopedia with its
glossy colour images of eye
surgery and live birth. The eyeTRAVEL & CULTURE: FREE TO A GOOD HOME
Nan Torti was a scrumper
before I even knew such a
term existed. Scrumping
is the act of foraging for
windfall fruit or helping
yourself to leftover, left-
behind veg in a farmer’s
field. It’s stealing with
pseudo-permission.