Maybe the reason I don’t care much for bottled water, even when it is very cold, is because of my memories of the 1940s and life on the little farm in the Midwestern USA.

Back then, when I was just a kid, we had never heard of buying water in one litre bottles for drinking. Our water all came from the old pump which was about fifteen feet from the kitchen door. The pump was an old iron gadget with a long handle that even a child could pump upward and downward a few times to get cold, refreshing water any time of day and any day in the year. I remember having to take the metal bucket out to the pump many times to fetch a pail of water for the kitchen use and for our weekly family bathing.

Although it seldom happened, we sometimes had to prime the pump. That refers to taking a cup of water and pouring it into the pipe in order to get the pump to bring up more of the cold liquid. Usually, that old pump was reliable and did not need to be primed.

As I said, the pump was conveniently located around fifteen feet from the kitchen door, which was the main door into the old farmhouse. It was also about eighteen feet from the open-topped tank from which the cows drank.

That tank was interesting to me as a kid. In the summer I could often see the wiggle tails, the mosquito larvae whipping around in the water before they reached maturity and emerged as those pesky mosquitoes. That drinking tank for the cows was also a pitfall for the chickens on the farm. From time to time, we would find the body of a chicken that had tried to get a drink from the tank and fell in, drowning in the three feet of water.

My father had the wintry duty of breaking the ice in the cows’ water tank so they could get to the water. The pump never seemed to freeze up although the water tank did.

After I got a little older, my father rigged up a motorized mechanism to the pump so we did not have to pump the handle by hand. That made life somewhat easier for me and my brothers since we often had the job of being water boys for the family.

I’m not sure why that water tasted so good to me. It always seemed to be cold enough to be refreshing. That may be a part of the reason I loved it. I also remember that Mom kept an old tin can, probably a can that had held pork and beans, on the top of the pump. To me, water always tastes better when it is drunk from a tin can rather than a glass. A modern type of plastic glass is a real turnoff for me. A cold tin can of water from the old farmhouse pump sounds so good.

That farm was sold, and the house and buildings were removed to make room for crops such as corn or soy beans. I doubt I could find where the pump used to be if I visited the place now. In my mind, however, it is still very real, a great memory of bygone days.