As big as it was, though, I had not noticed it until an auction-regular asked me if I had seen it. The tub was invisible to me as I crazily moved from a room full of antique dolls to another with the regular supply of paintings, glassware and other knickknacks and another with cheap box lots. On this day, there was too much stuff to preview.

An Image Spa hot tub for sale at auction.

A metal tag on the tub bore the label “Image Spa.” The tub was encased in a wood surround that was missing a few vertical slats here and there. A wide gray water-stained cover, folded in half, was propped against one side.

Once I saw the tub, it was not to be missed again. It didn’t attract many admiring eyes, though, likely because none of us could figure out how to get the thing home if we bought it. But that wasn’t all.

The tub and its cover were filthy. One section on the inside of the tub was thick with dust and dirt, and I’m sure the filter was just as bad. “You’d think someone would’ve cleaned it first,” one auction-goer said to me. He was right. That may have made it much more appealing.

In the middle of all the dirt lay a small travel-size bar of Dove soap in an unopened box. It would take a million of those to lather up this thing up to clean it.

Dove soap inside the tub.

The auction for the hot tub didn’t occur until later in the day during the furniture sale. About 20 or so people stood with the auctioneer around its perimeter.

This tub is worth $1,000, the auctioneer said, and just to give buyers a break, he started the bidding at $500. Not a soul took a nibble. Then he dropped the price and kept dropping it until he stopped at $50. One man called out $30, and the auctioneer accepted the bid. He tried mightily for a $35 counteroffer but he only got silence.

Finally, he gave up and sold that huge hot tub for $30. Then he and his troop of buyers moved on to the next item of furniture – a three-piece bedroom set.

I wondered how the buyer would get the tub home. He’d take it apart and move it in pieces, he said. I found that a bit strange, since the largest piece was the deep tub itself. It made me wonder if he had thought through the purchase before making it.

There were some small areas of the tub that escaped the thick layer of dust.

Apparently, his female companion (who may have been his wife) wondered the same thing when he called out to her that he had bought the monstrosity he was standing next to. She was seated comfortably in a cushioned chair far away from the furniture auction. She was incredulous, wondering why he had bought such a thing. If she’d bought it, she said, he’d think that she had lost it.

A few minutes later, I overheard the buyer telling another man – one of several who engaged him about his purchase - that he had bought it for his sister’s back yard.

I watched as the buyer examined the tub. He tried to open what looked like a door but wasn’t. He pulled aside the dirty gray cover, and spider webs were attached to the wood. This tub seemed to have been out of service for a long time.

The hot tub cover was water-stained and dirty, but seemed to be in good shape.

In Googling later, I found free Image hot tub manuals that made setup and care of these spas seem like a chore:

When filled, they can weigh up to 2,000 pounds.

You should check your local building codes before installing it outside.

The tub must be near an electrical outlet. The power cord must be plugged into a grounded circuit (at a particular amp), and should not be buried in the ground. Don’t use an extension cord.

The tub should be near a water source. You’ll need a garden hose or some other device for filling it.

The water pump must be primed (there are instructions) each time you refill the tub or clean the filter. You must test and treat the water.

Keep electrical appliances – radios, TVs – and metal objects away from the tub.

Don’t allow water temp to exceed 104 degrees. Do use a thermometer to gauge it.

The hot tub appeared to have been out of use for a long time.

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They were all ATT touch-tone phones that once cost a quarter to use – or, according to a red/white/blue label on the phone, “Get a 6-minute call for $1.00 anywhere in the U.S.” They were in fact an anachronism – and I suspect totally unrecognizable to many young people who use their latest smart phone to reach out and touch.

The discarded ATT pay phones at auction were dusty and filthy.

Some of us still remember that trusty pay phone and the dimes and quarters we carried around to make a phone call. If you were lucky, the phone worked, but they were always so filthy. I haven’t had a need for a pay phone in years – thank goodness. I can remember holding the phones away from my face because I was afraid I’d catch something.

No one seemed to be pawing the phones at auction, likely because they weren’t sure how to re-constitute them. Scoured, they could be hung on a wall as decoration in your home or retrofitted for use as a working phone without the need of a quarter.

These phones, once ubiquitous, aren’t around much anymore – which I found out after leaving the auction early because there wasn’t much I wanted to buy. I stopped at a diner-style restaurant for lunch, one of those sleepy neighborhood places where waitresses know the regulars by name.

As I sat at a booth waiting for a cup of its awesome lima bean soup and a turkey burger, I spied a faux wooden open cabinet with shelf attached to a wall in the glass-enclosed alcove. A series of pockmarked holes stood out on its back wall. I realized that it had once held a pay phone like the ones I had just seen at auction. I was sure that many customers had dropped their coins into the slot, propped their arm on the shelf and made that all important phone call.

Four pay phones ready to be sold.

I wondered if that old phone had also ended up like the others. For years, these phones have been slipping out of existence. The major phone companies have gotten out of the pay-phone business or cut back tremendously, and some smaller companies are struggling.

Pay-phone usage has been declining about 10 percent a year, according to a 2011 Wall Street Journal article. Only 425,000 are still in existence across the country, down from 2.2 million in 2000, the article stated, using information provided by the American Public Communications Council, an industry trade group. The number has dropped from 2.1 million in 1999 to 550,000 in 2009, according to a 2011 article in the Saint Louis Post Dispatch newspaper.

Where we once went into a convenience store or stood outside it in a phone booth to make a call, we now go inside to use the ATM with our smart phones glued to our ears. They apparently continue to be staples in low-income neighborhoods, airports, truck stops and some other places.

An illustration from a 1912 catalog from the Gray Telephone Pay Station Co. The coin-operated pay phone was invented by William Gray.

The first coin-operated telephone was installed in a bank in Hartford, CT, in 1889, and allowed you to make your call and then pay for it, according to several sites that repeated the same history. It was invented by a man named William Gray, who some years before had improved on the baseball catcher protector and sold it to Spalding.

Western Electric in 1898 brought out the first prepay phone, the No. 5 Coin Collector, which accepted nickels, dimes, quarters and more. In 1905, Bell System installed the first outdoor phone in Cincinnati. Other developments occurred over the years, and pay phones were ubiquitous throughout the country – on sidewalks, and in convenience stores and gas stations.

Another site – pulling from a 1953 Mechanix Illustrated magazine – said Gray formed his company in 1891, experimented with a pay phone, and eventually set up his finished product on posts, in cabinets and on desks. Here’s a 1912 catalog of pay phones from the Gray Telephone Pay Station Co.

The first commercial touch-tone phones were introduced in the 1960s.

I wasn’t around when the pay phones were sold at auction, but I’m sure the buyer got a good price. On the web, I found a new Bell-style pay phone selling at Sam’s Club for $580 (and $298.42 more for an all-season outdoor metal enclosure), and others selling for up to $1,299. On eBay, a working Western Electric touch tone sold for $152. No coin needed.

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They looked like medieval finger-torturing tools, like nothing I had seen before. So, naturally, I was curious. There was no other bidder standing nearby to join me in a guessing game about the gadgets, so I waited until they came up for sale. I wondered if the auctioneer would make some wild guess or would actually be knowledgeable about them.

A fluting or pleating iron likely from the 18th century, for sale at auction.

The auctioneer picked up the first of the two, and surprisingly called it a “pleating machine” – admitting, though, that he didn’t know what it was himself until someone told him. “It’s for pressing clothes,” he explained. That description of its purpose seemed too simplistic because I knew those rollers were much too short for pressing a woman’s full pleated skirt.

The machines were on a shelf with several other dark and menacing tools – and I couldn’t identify those, either. The auctioneer identified them as a cherry stoner/pitter (sold for $20), a sausage maker ($40) and an apple peeler.

The pleating machines were the most intriguing, though, especially since they were connected to clothing. In researching, I found that they were better known as fluting irons or fluting machines, but were also called rufflers, crimpers and fluters. They were very popular during the 18th century when Victorian women wore dresses with mounds of fabric trimmed in dainty ruffles, flutes, flounces and small pleats.

The machines were used to “crimp, ruffle and press little pleats into starched fabric. Fluters were used for collars, cuffs, etc., and these vintage tools were an invention that saw their heyday in America from the 1860s through the 1880s,” according to the Mechanical Nature Antiques website. The site offered American and British fluting machines for sale.

Fashions from Godey's Lady's Book, circa l870s.

The crank handle on the machines was the outward extension of a rod that was heated and then re-inserted into a chamber to heat up the machine.

Women were apparently at the forefront of improving on fluting irons. I found several irons selling on the web that had been patented by a woman named Susan Knox in 1866, but she was not the first. At least 12 women in this country got patents for fluters, according to the 1993 book “Mothers and Daughters of Invention” by Autumn Stanley.

In 1862, Mary Carpenter got a patent for an ironing and fluting machine. And in 1866, Henrietta Cole patented her own versions of table and portable “pony” models, the latter of which won her several awards.

Knox trademarked her fluting machines with a “likeness” of herself, her signature and the patent date. Several for sale on the web mentioned this inscription on the machine: “Mrs. Susan R. Knox Fluting Machine, Every Lady Should Have One, Patent Nov. 20th 1866.”

I found the machines selling for $20 up to $650, and one sold on eBay for $130. The two at auction got very modest bids: They sold for $25 and $30.

A fluting or pleating iron sold at auction.

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Even I was impressed. Buoyed with confidence, he started the fourth property at $150,000. No takers. $100,000. Silence, even though his assistants on the floor tried to rev up the energy among bidders. $50,000, $25,000, $20,000, $15,000, $10,000, and finally $5,000. Then the bidders woke up from their slumber and someone raised a bid card.

This property in a very desirable zip code sold for $175,000 at the auction of properties owned by the Philadelphia Housing Authority.

The auctioneer apparently forget that age-old real-estate adage: Location, location, location. While the first three pieces of property were in a very desirable neighborhood of upper-crust row houses and townhouses, property #4 was not. It sold for $10,000.

It took two more property sales before he realized that he was in a different zip code, and had to drop the starting price accordingly. For the next hour, most of the properties started at $5,000 and never got above $31,000 – with most considerably less.

The housing authority had 92 single properties for sale at this auction, the second in a month. The first auction held in mid-November included 400 houses, lots and other properties. Some of them were singles, but most were bundled into multiples. Those sold from $17,000 to $1.2 million, according to one news account.

The authority was selling off the houses to fight blight in local Philadelphia communities and to privatize the properties, according to a story in my local newspaper. These auctions were the first sponsored by the housing authority. The agency owns about 3,300 vacant properties and got permission from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban development to get rid of some of them, either through nonprofit organizations or by selling at market value.

None of the properties at the first sale were in move-in condition. But that didn’t seem to bother the 500 people who showed up then and the 300 or so – from my early count – who turned out on a rainy day for this one. The huge ballroom was partly filled, with some people propped against the back wall or standing, although there were empty seats all around. A two-man guitar combo played gentle and relaxing mood music, and assistants worked the room introducing themselves and inviting questions.

Cars are on a lot that sold for $170,000 at auction.

Before the auction, a potential bidder two rows in front of me stopped one assistant as he walked by. “Absolutely, you’ll get a clear title,” the assistant said in response to a question I did not hear. Behind me another man said, “They went crazy the last time,” adding that he didn’t buy anything because the bids were so high. This time, on the auction list, he had used a red pen to block out three properties in what looked like good zip codes.

When the auction began, several of the assistants bounced around the room like evangelists, shouting out when a bid card was raised. One assistant held her arms open like a worshipper in supplication. Another was actually doing a little jig. They made for a festive atmosphere – a tactic, I assume, to get people warm and cuddly and open to bidding.

The auction was conducted by Max Spann Real Estate & Auction, which, according to owner Max Sr., had been around in some form since 1895. His grandfather started it, he said, importing cows from the Isle of Jersey (off the coast of France and for which the state of New Jersey was named) that were sold at auction. Max Sr. has been in the business for 50 years, but he started out as a farmer raising cows and crops, which he still does, he said.

With this auction, he said, “we’re getting people together. By doing this, they determine the value of the market.”

He’s right, and that’s the case with any auction. Not only do bidders determine the value based on how bad they want the item, but they set the value for that particular period in time. Tomorrow, the item – or in this case, the property – could be worth more or less.

The housing authority’s properties were scattered throughout the city. All were sold as it, and buyers had to pay a 10 percent premium or $200, whichever was greater.

I wasn’t around for the entire auction so I’m not sure what the highest price was paid for any property. As I looked around the room, some of the bidders seemed to be people looking for a home of their own, like the couple who paid $7,000 for a property.

Not too far away was the second location, again an empty lot enclosed by a fence with a thriving green vine growing over it. A light-pole banner advertised “Marian Anderson Heritage Village,” with a link to the website of the group that manages a nonprofit organization in memory of the famed singer. This, too, was a very desirable street with one house bearing a “Sold” sign and another with a “For Sale” sign. This parcel went for $175,000.

The northern property had drawn a lot of interest in the bidding. It was in a less-stellar neighborhood and was one of those old big row houses made of tan brick on a well-tended street. Its windows were boarded. It had sold for $31,000.

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I asked the couple standing next to me if they knew why the two were together. They were just as baffled as me. I wrote a blog post about how human hair was used for making jewelry during Victorian times, so I guess spinning it wouldn’t be much of a stretch. I’d think it would be too thin, though.

A spinning wheel and its passenger wait to be sold.

Curious for an answer – if there were one – I went Googling. I found a photo for sale of a Victorian-looking woman standing next to a spinning wheel with hair on it, but the photo had no caption. I saw several links on how to spin dog and pet hair into yarn as a keepsake, but I didn’t bother to check the links.

So, I kept searching for the connection. Then I came across another link on spinning dog hair into yarn and was sufficiently intrigued. It was the story of a woman who’d made a business of it in her western New York home. She creates flowers, pillows, hats, scarves, shawls and more, priced at $30 to $500 (for a shawl). She asks pet owners to hoard the stuff in paper bags or pillowcases until they have enough. She even says that dog hair is warmer than wool.

One of her most common questions, according to the story: Will the item smell like the family dog if it gets wet? She says no, that once the hair is cleaned of the animal’s oils, it will not smell like dog.

Human or synthetic hair had been placed on the spinning wheel.

It still seemed kind of yucky to me. I kept searching for whether human hair could be spun. On a thread in a 2008 forum, a woman asked for advice on spinning her own hair after her husband said he’d wear a sweater made of it. Respondents suggested that she combine it with wool.

I wasn’t able to find anything authoritative on the issue, so I’m assuming that some auction staffer inadvertently dropped the wig atop the spinning wheel. I wasn’t around when it sold, but I’m sure the buyer was thinking wool as the preferable material rather than hair.

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I rarely buy furniture but I always do a walk-through before the furniture auction starts just to see what has turned up. I had missed this toilet bowl because it was hidden in a far corner behind some heavy furniture in a space near some neat old wooden tables painted lime green and white. Remove the garish colors and you’d have two wonderful pieces.

This antique Victorian toilet bowl was made by a company called Ronalds & Johnson of Brooklyn, NY.

I was actually waiting for the auction of a lovely Yamaha grand piano when the toilet came up for sale. For such a utilitarian item, it was elaborate, with a curvy embossed design along its side that likely made it a fashionable seat in someone’s equally nice bathroom. It probably had not been used for ages, for on the side was a wide cinnamon-colored stain that looked like rust. It needed a good long cleaning.

At the angle it was sitting there on the table, I wasn’t sure what it was. From afar, it resembled a toilet bowl but it didn’t have a tank. It didn’t look like the bowl in my house nor the plain and simple ones you see at Lowe’s and Home Depot. Those are lightweight, not the heavy ceramic that this one was made of. Maybe the lack of a tank was throwing me off.

An up-close view of the embossed design on the exterior of the bowl.

When I moved into my home some years ago, it came with a lovely claw-foot tube in the bathroom on the third floor, with fixtures that seemed to be original. The house was built in the 1920s, so the tub was likely the same age. I’ve had to change its leaky fixtures as well as the toilet, and if I could have found a reproduction toilet like this fancy one, I would’ve gone for it.

Toilets of any kind don’t come up often at the auctions I attend. Bathroom fixtures – most new and still in the box – are much more common, along with cabinets, lighting and glass shelves. At an on-site house sale once, several chamber pots or slop jars were auctioned.

Searching the web, I found a similar toilet bowl on the site Vintage Plumbing – which also offered a page of questions and answers about such plumbing – that described it as Victorian. The site had a circa 1902 toilet bowl made by the John Douglas Co. (founded in 1887 in Cincinnati, OH, but no longer around, the site said) and a bowl marked W S Cooper Brass Works of Philadelphia, circa 1889. Vintage Plumbing was selling bowls for up to $2,600. A Victorian bidet was on sale for $1,500. Another site had a Douglas bowl circa 1890 that sold for $550.

An inside view of the toilet bowl. It needed a good cleaning.

Stamped on the toilet bowl at auction was the name Ronalds & Johnson Co. at the back and Vigilant on the front rim. This was a Brooklyn, NY, company, according to a 1902 book that mentioned its bowling team.

Bidding on the bowl started high – as usual – then went low, but not low enough for anyone to readily speak up. To lighten the bidding, one of the staffers described the bowl as a garden planter. I suppose a lot of creative thinking could design it into a planter, but who’d want it in their garden?

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“She was a big kid,” my auction buddy Janet offered.

She must have been a new collector because most of the items were contemporary limited-edition collectibles – the kind you pay big money for but are not worth much once you try to sell them. They are collectibles to be admired in a glass case, not kept as a retirement investment.

Contents from the house were laid out on tables on the front lawn. They included items the homeowner both collected and used.

Several pieces of reproduction antique-style furniture and some modern sofas were on the front lawn not far from the tables. In an unlighted horse shed at the rear of the house were a half-dozen old lanterns and other items I could not identify. There was still hay in an open space near the back of the shed. Even the rancher house was for sale – not by the auction company but by a realtor.

The house and its contents belonged to a woman who now lived in Maryland, the auctioneer told us. She had moved out about seven years ago and apparently was just getting around to selling the stuff she didn’t take with her. He had liquidated her mother’s house about three or four years ago, and she had called on him to do hers.

Most of the items went for bargain-basement prices – as they sometimes do at auctions. I was more intrigued, though, with what they told us about who she was. So, I took my time combing the tables, studying the items, picking them up and lingering among them.

Here are some of the things she collected and left behind for us bidders. I’m sure that she kept many more of them for herself:

Ashton Drake Gene Marshall dolls.

She was seriously into dolls, and she bought all kinds of them. The auction house had laid them out on four tables, double-row in some cases. Ashton-Drake Gene Marshall fashion dolls (which sold for about $5 to $10 each). Barbies still in their boxes (one of the most expensive was Wizard of Oz’s Dorothy that sold for $32.50). Lee Middleton baby doll (came as part of a lot for about $15). All kinds of porcelain dolls. Clown dolls.

From left, a Raikes bunny, a Ty bear and other stuffed animals in plastic bags.

She loved stuffed animals, especially the small Ty animals. She had a tall Plexiglass case literally stuffed with Ty Beanie Babies (sold for $95). She also had Raikes bears and rabbits with polished wooden faces (I had never heard of Raikes but I thought they were cute and different), the traditional stuffed bears (she had only one of the famed Steiff bears) and some plastic rabbits. Most of the stuffed animals sold for no more than $5 each.

A box of pretty shoes too small for most of us.

Mini decorative ceramic shoes. I’ve seen these at auction pretty often, and these were actually lovely.

The framed duck prints were popular at the auction.

Someone in the family – Janet assumed it was her husband – loved duck prints, because at last 15 to 20 of them had been propped against the tables. They sold for $10 to $40 each. There were also a few wooden decoys.

Functional and play things for a child or doll.

She liked toddler-sized collectibles, possibly for her dolls. These had been set up under the trees.

Some of her other likes were Department 56 Snowbabies (most were in good condition and many were still in their original boxes. The auctioneer said they were found in the attic), Longaberger baskets, Mickey Mouse memorabilia and Spode dishes. Among the most expensive item sold on the tables was a 12-piece blue-and-white patterned Haviland dinnerware set for $110.

These were the items from her life that were sold:

Like most of us, she decorated her house for the holidays, because there were bags and tubs of Christmas and Halloween decorations.

She had pets, and she may have traveled with them.

Someone in the house was into bowling.

This church pew illustrated that she may have had a taste for the unusual in her decorating, or she just liked the look of it.

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“This was when women had it tough,” he said to the two other people with him. He was walking towards a lovely yellow vintage wringer washing machine that from a distance looked like it had not been used often. He touched the wringer, seemingly amazed and enamored with this wash-day anachronism. “Can you believe that,” he said. “I’ll be darned.”

The wringer on the electric-powered washing machine was both a blessing and a danger.

I had spotted the machine about five minutes before he approached it, and I was also taken by its look. It stood out among the disparate collection of powered wheelchairs and small tables at the auction house. We both knew it was a source of labor for women who had to carefully guide wet clothes through it without losing their fingers or any other body part. The man obviously came from a home where mothers, grandmothers and aunts did the laundry and not the family maid (as evidenced in the movie “The Help,” where they cooked, cleaned, washed, ironed and raised the babies).

From where I stood, the Westinghouse machine appeared to be clean on the outside and inside, and its metal agitator was still intact in the tub. As I rounded it for a more thorough look, I saw telltale signs that it had worked hard: Thick grease and dirt had darkened the electric motor on the left side.

Intrigued, I went searching for more information on this metal contraption built to do ”woman’s work” and came across a fascinating bit of history buried deep in Google:

A black woman named Ellen F. Eglin of Washington, DC, invented what some sites described as a successful clothes wringer in the 1880s. She never benefited, though, because she didn’t patent it. Instead, she sold her design to an agent for $18. She said in Woman Inventor magazine in 1891 that she sold it for one reason: “You know I am black and if it was known that a Negro woman patented the invention, white ladies would not buy the wringer. I was afraid to be known because of my color in having it introduced into the market.”

The wringer machine was a lovely yellow color.

Not much is known about Eglin. She was born in 1849, and worked as a housekeeper for a time – that’s probably where she got the idea for the wringer, to help relieve herself of the tough work. She was a member of the Women’s National Industrial League – a female labor union headed by Charlotte Smith (who founded Woman Inventor magazine) – and worked as a federal clerk in the Treasury Department and the Census Bureau, according to the 1995 book “Mothers and Daughters of Invention” by Autumn Stanley.

Eglin apparently was working on another invention in the 1890s that she had planned to show off at the Women’s International Industrial Inventors Congress. Other sites I came across mentioned that the first clothes wringer was added to machines around 1861, and none of them mentioned Eglin’s device. So, I’m not sure if she invented the wringer or developed her own version.

Before 1900, washing machines were cranked by hand, and the first electric-powered machines were sold around 1908. It would be after World War II before the first top -loading automatic machines were manufactured. A collector of vintage washing machines has corralled his finds in a museum in Eaton, CO, called the Lee Maxwell Washing Machine Museum. It has 400 machines, including some early wooden ones, according to the museum website.

The website noted that the Nineteen Hundred Corp. (which later became Whirlpool) promoted its powered machine with a label on the side of the wringer that said “Saves Women’s Lives.” Then there was the Women’s Friend Machine designed to lessen the amount of time to do laundry.

The inside of the Westinghouse wringer washing machine.

This very practical and useful device could also be dangerous to fingers, hands, breasts, hair and clothes. A report from the 1960s out of Chicago talked about the seriousness of the injuries caused by things getting caught between the rollers, including the clothes of a 4-year-old who choked to death.

I wasn’t around when the machine sold but one auction-regular said that it went for $80-$90. I wondered how it would be used; perhaps sitting in a store, my auction buddy Janet suggested. It would certainly be a conversation-starter.

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It looked just like the old round-bellied cast iron pot that my grandmother heated up to clean her white clothes dizzyingly white. I grew up in a rural area outside Macon, GA, when washing machines for many people were a luxury. My grandmother washed clothes the way she had done it for years, and probably as her mother and her mother before that.

A big black pot ready to be auctioned.

I can still see her building a fire under the pot in the back yard with small kindling wood to get it started. She’d pour in her soap powder – or lye soap or whatever she used; I don’t’ recall what it was. Then she’d drop her white sheets and pillowcases into the scalding water with its white suds, and occasionally stir the clothes with a stick (like a washing machine agitator, I suppose) or replace burned-out firewood.

It seemed like she never left that pot while the fire was going and the clothes were soaking. I’d watch her on hot summer mornings (I don’t recall what she did in the wintertime, but I’m sure it was the same routine. Winters were not as harsh as they are these days). A short distance away, my cousins and I, fresh from breakfast, would draw hopscotch squares on the ground, finding the perfect stone to throw in the boxes and hopping on one foot to the top of it.

I don’t remember how involved we were in the washing, but knowing my grandmother we were expected to help out in some way by either replenishing the fire or adding water to the pot.

Once the clothes were soaked a good long time, she used the stick to remove them dripping wet from the hot pot to cool water in tin tubs. I remember scrub boards (we called them ‘rub boards”), so she must’ve used them on some items (Did she use lye soap? I don’t remember). In fact, we all used the boards to wash clothes.

Once used for scrubbing clothes, these rub boards now decorate my laundry room.

Then, the clothes would be rinsed, squeezed to remove excess water and taken to a clothes line that stretched between a large pecan tree to smaller trees not far from the house. The clothes line seemed to go on forever to us children whose sight lines and sizes were short. I remember hanging clothes on the metal line with wooden clothespins like the ones I now come across at auction.

Washing clothes in this way seemed like the most natural thing to do. But what seemed right at one point in time doesn’t make it right forever. Now, as I’m writing this, the washing machine and dryer in my basement are doing the drudgery work that Big Mama would do on those sweaty days. The heaviest thing I carry is a hamper of clothes from my second floor to the basement laundry room, where I have four small washboards decorating a countertop. They’ve never touched water in my house.

We hung clothes with clothespins to dry on a metal line.

This tradition of outdoor clothes-washing in a big black pot wasn’t just some singular memory of mine. I came across several essays by others who had some of the same recollections but with clearer details. Norris Chambers Old Timer’s Tales outlined the whole process for wash day, recalling that the pots were about 18 inches in diameter, held 20 gallons of water and had small legs to keep them off the ground.

I found several other stories of big black pots used for washing by families in North Carolina, Texas and Tennessee. Other writers told of firing them up to boil water on hog-killing days, and using them to render fat from hog skin, thereby producing cracklins.

Those of us who remember this decidedly southern ritual talk about them nostalgically. I’m sure those were not the “good old days” for my grandmother and the women who actually washed the clothes. It was hot hard work that they could not escape. Embedded in the pots, though, are all our good memories of them whom we have immortalized. Each time we see one, as a planter or depicted in a painting, we are taken back to them.

This is an old black pot cookbook that I had to have.

Some years ago, when I was driving from Florida to visit my family, I stopped by one of those pecan shops in south Georgia (pecans in the shell are one of my food loves) and was looking through the cookbooks. I came across a small one with crude illustrations and recipes that I remembered from my childhood. So I just had to buy it.

What compelled me most to buy it was its title and cover: “big mama’s Old Black Pot,” with a woman standing over a black pot on an old stove. How could I resist?

Related posts:

1. They remind me of Big Mama
2. Wringer washing machine leads to black female inventor
3. Is that dirt in those planters?

Then they mosey on down to their nearest Lowes and behold, they learn that they can get as nice a set for less money.

Whenever I see the commercial, I want to expand their search: to their local auction house. There, they’ll spend even less on patio furniture than they would just about anywhere else – unless a special aunt gave it to them as a gift.

I’ve become an evangelist for encouraging folks to try out auctions. You can find just about anything you want at a price that’s way below reasonable. I’ve bought a number of items for my home and didn’t even both to look elsewhere – a paper shredder when the old one died, dishes and glasses to replace broken ones, a portable radio that was at the ready for Hurricane Irene last week.

Patio furniture ready for sale. Auctions are a good place to buy the sets.

When my vacuum cleaner lost most of its suction, I went hunting and was outbidded on a Dyson. All the other vacuum cleaners I saw at auction were filthy, so I had to break down and get one on sale. I was also looking for an iron at auction but before I could buy one, my friend Elaine gave me a new one she had bought and never used. Several unused high-priced irons have come up since then and I could have gotten one for less than $10.

When I needed furniture for my backyard, I came across three sturdy wooden slatted chairs. I got the set plus about a half-dozen white plastic chairs (which I eventually donated to the Salvation Army) for 30 bucks. I painted the chairs a bright red and they look cozy with the huge red Pottery Barn umbrella in my backyard. I bought the umbrella in my pre-auction days. It’s starting to fade, so I should probably look for another one at auction.

I’ve written about lovely patio sets that I’ve come across, most of which can run for less than $100 for the entire set or not much over that.

You can locate an auction near you via auctionzip.com. You may not find what you want the first time around, but if you’re patient you will. One of the auction houses I visit quite often almost always has a patio set or two for sale.

Most of these are not your plastic sets that may not be able to weather the elements. They are beautiful vintage wrought irons, some with cushions and some without, all just needing a little cleaning. Spend your money on a few nice cushions and you’ll have a set that your friends will think you got at one of those high-end stores.

After seeing the Lowes’ commercial too many times, I started to look through printed ads for the prices of patio furniture. Most were in the hundreds of dollars, and the ones for less were items you wouldn’t want.

Here are a few of the sets from auctions:

I fell in love with this green and white striped set, which was in remarkably good condition. I believe that it was one of the few that went for more than $100.

This black set was among some outdoor furniture. It did not sell high.

This black set, too, was among some outdoor furniture. It did not sell high, either.

The aqua color of this set wowed me.

And so did this one.

Related posts:

1. Furniture that caught my eye
2. Steel furniture with an artist’s touch
3. Faux wood furniture