If you would have said “clawfoot” to me about a week ago, I would have thought of Pokémon, for my seven-year-old son talks nonstop about these fictive creatures — and “Clawfoot” sounds like a perfect name for one of them.
But then, my family traveled to rural Pennsylvania and stayed with our extended family. My father’s cousin has renovated the ancestral farmhouse atop the same foundation, and most everything in the home is now brand new … except for the clawfoot tub.
A clawfoot tub is aptly named. The four “legs” supporting the deep, wide basin are adorned with three-pronged talons reminding me of the art of Maurice Sendak: Where are the wild things? In the bathroom, apparently. On the farm my kids and I saw deer, rabbits and groundhogs. There was a huge wild turkey who strutted on its own clawed feet into the yard each morning at 8 a.m. After we had explored the grassy fields, climbed the gnarled apple trees and played in the muddy creek, we ended the day with the gooey s’mores. Good thing there was a bathtub for my wild children!
My kids became the fifth generation to bathe in this clawfoot tub. My great-grandmother filled the tub with water pumped from the well and heated on the wood-burning stove. I showed my seven-year-old son the reason for the tub’s name and he wondered, “What if it started to walk?”
There was magic in that house. Not from walking tubs, but family history. The air was thick was stories.
Dad remembers when he was about the age of seven and had spent the day running around the property. His father was not the domestic type, but for whatever reason the chore of bathing the children had fallen to him that evening. Granddad scrubbed my dad with a washcloth from head to toe, even between his toes! Standing in that tub, the little boy who would grow up to be my dad marveled, “I’ve never been this clean in my whole life!”
Sixty years later, my family took advantage of the proximity to Legoland in New York where my children witnessed a variety of wild and amazing things, including the clawfoot dragons of Ninjago. I think they will remember the rollercoaster and water park for years to come.
But one just never knows what will lodge in the memory. A clawfoot tub can walk down the corridor of time.
Andrew Taylor-Troutman is the author of “Little Big Moments,” a collection of mini-essays about parenting, and “Tigers, Mice & Strawberries: Poems.” Both titles are available most anywhere books are sold online. Taylor-Troutman lives in Chapel Hill where he serves as pastor of Chapel in the Pines Presbyterian Church and occasionally stumbles upon the wondrous while in search of his next cup of coffee.
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