Clare Briggs / Comics

Thawing The Pump

by Clare Briggs · January 15, 2021

Tags: Cold Days of Real Sport Snow

Clare Briggs

Clare Briggs is a famous cartoonist who lived from 1875 to 1930. Poems by Wilbur Nesbitt.

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Marchmaine says:

January 15, 2021 at 8:36 am

I’m much too young for this to resonate on a household basis… but man, winter, water, farm, and animals give me some feels. The self draining pump was a great invention.Report
- Kolohe in reply to Marchmaine says:
  
  January 15, 2021 at 9:21 am
  
  I’m just barely old enough to remember my grandmother’s Nova Scotia house having a hand pump in the kitchen pantry that she used before a new well was dug and a regular (cold water only) water line was run to that space.
  
  This was though a house that my grandmother had bought after she retired from nursing, and only lived there in the summer. (She had grown up in the area, but as like the second daughter of some 12 kids overall, wasn’t even close to getting any part of the ‘family homestead’
  
  (There was indoor plumbing, a regular full bathroom, in another part of the house, installed at my mother’s, her daughter-in-law’s, insistence after I was born, if my grandmother wanted for her grandson to visit ever again)Report
  - Marchmaine in reply to Kolohe says:
    
    January 15, 2021 at 9:54 am
    
    We’re so modern we had a second, warm water well dug last year
    
    Our one major vulnerability on the homestead is water… if the power goes out for an extended period (like 3-weeks) we’re sunk and all the animals will be gone one way or another. I keep looking for Solar and/or hand pumps to augment the well, but I’m in that bad place where I can see the engineering specs, but can’t build the engineering specs… and can’t find someone who will.
    
    At night when no one is looking, I get paranoid about all or our assumptions regarding electricity and it’s omnipresence.Report
  - North in reply to Kolohe says:
    
    January 15, 2021 at 11:17 am
    
    Where in Nova Scotia did your Grandmother’s house lie? I’m a south shore raised fellow myself.
    
    Water pumps are yet another thing that people born in my odd time window have just a vague experience with. They were there, mostly old and rusting but still functioning and generally no longer used having been replaced by powered water line systems before our memories started really gelling. We used to have a blast playing with it. There’s something… I don’t know… just neat about driving that handle, feeling the suction take and then eventually having the water come pouring out. Neat, that is, when you were merely getting a drink and didn’t need to fill a whole pail or a barrel. That would, of course, be work.Report
    - Kolohe in reply to North says:
      
      January 16, 2021 at 2:19 pm
      
      Rose bay, between Lunenburg and Bridgewater. Yeah, I remember my grandmother using the pump a few times, and I have a picture of me as a four year old with it (and other one with me as I think a twenty year old with the pump handle still there, long deactivated)
      
      Not sure if this will work
      
      https://share.icloud.com/photos/0RvE-tETCBpOl2U4pO_krb3dgReport
- Michael Cain in reply to Marchmaine says:
  
  January 15, 2021 at 5:20 pm
  
  When I was a lad, six or eight I suppose, there was still a hand pump outside my grandparents’ house in a tiny town in southern Iowa. It disappeared after the day one summer when I managed to pour enough hot water down it to get the (probably) old leather seals to expand so it would work. Around that same time, the house next door had a small hand pump mounted on the kitchen counter and extending over the sink because the old lady preferred it to the taste of town water. (The rest of that house was properly plumbed with town water and sewer.)Report