goat milk soap

Back in October we drove over to Wakulla Springs State Park and stayed at the Lodge there for five nights, in order to get close enough to Tallahassee to visit TJCC and go to a Lincoln High School football game. We loved going to a game or two each of the seven years the girls where playing in the marching band, though I think we missed a season during covid. Caroline is now a junior at Florida State; and this year Charlotte was leading the marching band as drum major, and a graduating senior, so it was our final opportunity for the doting grandparent adventure to see the girls in the band. It is also the end of our driving out of town except maybe once in a while to Apalachicola, which is straight shot just beyond Tyndall, easy traffic, and if we do that it'll be for a midweek overnight or two and maybe once across the bridges to the Blue Parrot on St George Island.

On our October trip we stopped in Apalachicola at the bookshop, where I nearly bought them out; and at the honey shop, where purchases included a bottle of Danish honey-mead that we opened and shared Christmas Day and I'm still pouring an icy sip now and then; and also, for the first Time, we went to the soap shop where the specialty is goat milk soap - - Linda wanting to buy bars for Xmas gifts.

While we were there I charmed myself with memories from early life now many decades ago. Standing in the downstairs bathroom and watching my father work up soap with his shaving brush, and then lather his face, and shave carefully with a straight razor. It was so long ago that I have to put it back in the late nineteen-thirties or early forties, but I remember him sharpening the razor blade by flapping it back and forth, whap whap whap whap on the long brown leather strop. I remember the shaving brush, and I remember the soap, sometimes Yardley shaving soap in a little wooden bowl with a wooden lid, other Times it was Old Spice shaving soap in an ivory colored mug with a handle. There were years when buying a gift for my father was easy: shaving soap in a bowl or mug, even after he changed to a safety razor, always a single-edge Gillette blade that he changed now and then, I never knew how often. I don't recall ever seeing the double-edge blades and razor.

Years later, into my own shaving life, by when the magical Schick injector razor had come into being, I had my own shaving brush and, variously, the Old Spice shaving soap mug, or the little hand-held wooden bowl of Yardley. But I've not had that for many years, having given way to Barbasol foam shaving soap from the aerosol can. In fact, over the years there has been an assortment of several scents of Barbasol cans in my bathroom cabinet, and I've varied from one to another just on a whim from day to day.

However, in the Apalachicola soap shop that October morning, I noticed little rounds of shaving soap for sale, and to house them, little pottery bowls perfect for handholding while you lathered up the shaving brush, which they also offered two different shaving brushes. Thus, as I say, charmed with memories, I purchased. One bowl, mine is sort of turquoise blue-green with little fish imprinted swimming around the rim, one brush, and two or three little rounds of shaving soap made with goat's milk. It lathers beautifully and brushes on smoothly and softly.

We have a busy day today, five things to do and places to go and people to see, two already completed so three to go including haircut and taking Kristen's new car to the body shop for collision estimate (I crashed it into a road hazard the second Time we had it out on the highway). The haircut, it's about Time: as I've written before, my Navy years, I usually got a haircut once a week until slacking off as a slob toward the end. Later years a haircut about every other week. Nowadays a haircut every four or five weeks. But, hey! when we lived in Japan, 1963-1966, a haircut was 10¢ and nowadays you're lucky to escape only leaving behind a twenty dollar bill.

Breakfast: black coffee, fried eggs on toast, couple fried crisp slices of that good Jamestown Brand bacon from Bill's. Dinner: bronze cut thin spaghetti from Italy, Alfredo sauce with cut up chicken breast, curry powder stirred in, and a can of LeSeur tiny green peas; most excellent. Maybe a glass of French, Argentinian, or Italian red.

Today, 65°F and a hundred percent chance of rain threatening the Mardi Gras festival and parade.

RSF&PTL