Five Gallon Bucket Culture
My childhood was full of five gallon buckets. The green bucket was the diaper pail. The orange bucket held whole wheat flour, made from wheat grown in our fields and freshly ground as we needed it. The yellow bucket held molasses, until it tipped over and spilled its viscous contents into the rock floor of our cold storage room in the basement. Other less colorful buckets, labeled with sharpie markers, held other staples: rice, oatmeal, dry beans and lentils, barley, buckwheat, millet, honey.
Five gallon buckets collected rainwater, served as a basket on our pulley system in the tree house, held garden seeds, and served as impromptu chamber pots in cases of necessity. We mixed mud pies in them, cleaned up spilled grain with them, and fed calves with them.
The buckets we used for feeding calves were the same buckets my father and his brothers carried, full of ground oats, barley, screenings and corn, a generation prior. These were metal buckets with wooden handles, most of them still sturdy enough to carry the ground feed from the wagon to the bunks in the corral. A few had been repaired, and a few were rusting out at the bottom and left tiny trickles of grain dust in their wake as one walked.
My great-grandpa Bossert was the Selby school custodian for over thirty years, and several of our feed pails were salvaged from that era, as was evident from the writing on their walls: floor wax, soap and other janitorial supplies had once filled them. Others were oil buckets, and unlike their contemporary plastic counterparts, their metal sides did not crack if one whacked the bucket against something on a frigid day. Some had significant dents from meeting the foreheads of pushy Hereford steers in frantic attempts at self preservation; if the buckets got too bad, dad would pound the dents out and we carried on.
My life is still full of five gallon buckets, indoors and out. I still carry feed in them, store wheat and honey in them, occasionally culture cheese or wine in them. For a decade or so, I used the same green pail that held my siblings’ (and my own) wet diapers for my own children’s cloth diapers. My neighbor says that a good bucket is one of the finer things in life, and I agree. I don’t have any quite as high class as those metal floor wax pails with wooden handles passed down from Grandpa B, but hydraulic oil buckets and pickle pails still come in handy on a daily basis.
A recent check of the water at the north pasture during a cold snap found things pretty froze up. As I weighed my options, I realized that I could probably just get some hot water from my nearest neighbor rather than driving all the way home to get it. A quick call confirmed that she was home, so I drove the two miles to their place instead of the ten home and we went hunting for buckets. After finding two of the right sort in the shop—no cracks, yes, lids that at least sort of fit—we had a nice visit while we filled the buckets with hot water.
As I headed back to thaw my frozen hydrant, I was pretty thankful that I live in a world where five gallon buckets are part and parcel of everyday life, where there was not question at all whether my neighbor would have one that I could borrow. They might not make the cover of Martha Stewart Living or Better Homes and Gardens, but they definitely make home, garden and ranch a better place.