Our parents had made a deal about fish cleaning. Margaret was happy to catch fish, but she drew the line at gutting and scaling them. Carl, having fished on Nova Scotia’s Clyde River as a boy, was an expert at fish preparation, and took those jobs upon himself. Entrails were sunk in the lake for other fish or left for mink on a mink rock. You could tell it was a mink rock by the scat with tiny fish bones and bits of crayfish shell in it. Later, when I was nine, I learned to tie trout flies, and I still have a collection of clumsy and unconvincing hooked and varnished imitation insects. Later still—let’s say eleven—I was given my own handy belt knife, with a fish scaler on the back.
Water for drinking came out of the hand pump in the kitchen. Water for dishwashing, and clothes washing, including baby diapers (in a zinc washtub, with a scrub board and Sunlight soap), was hauled up from the dock in pails and heated on the stove. Baths also took place in the zinc tub, but in cold months only; the rest of the time we took baths of a kind in the lake. We used Ivory soap because it floated.
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