Shiloh-on-Hampton

I can’t imagine what my mother had to take to the dry cleaners in those days. We were homesteading in the 1980s and lived in a one-room house with no indoor plumbing in the middle of nowhere Texas Hill Country.  Every summer, we coaxed a garden from dry caliche. My dad raised beefalo. We did most of our laundry on the porch in an old ringer-washer and hung it on the line to dry in the wind and sun. What was dry-cleaning anyway? I had wondered about that. How could you get clothes clean without water?  But I can remember pulling in under the sandstone drive-through of what had been a filling station but had been converted to the dry cleaners. We were driving our 1966 turquoise Dodge sedan with no air conditioning.  My mother cranked the window down all the way and handed the attendant the bag of clothes in exchange for the claim ticket. If we were lucky, the attendant would hand out lemon drops, one for each of us.  You couldn’t get your hopes up though because th...