Joys of Rural Living--the Lye Hunt

Living in the sticks has its advantages and disadvantages. The major disadvantage is that you can't go buy just anything you want. One of the items on my preparedness list is lye. Useful for making soap. I thought surely I'd find some in "town," so I drove the 45 miles there today and visited all four places I could think of that might carry something like that. The first two were lumber/hardware places and they BOTH said they had it and sent me out to the "yard" where I was directed to the LIME (apparently used in mortar and plaster--NOT the same thing as LYE). The third place was a farm/ranch store and the lady there knew exactly what I was talking about, but they didn't carry it and she sent me to the fourth place which was another lumber type/feed store. The owner of the place said in 45 years I was the first person to ask for lye and no, they didn't carry it either. By then I was running out of time to get everything else on my "town" list done so that was all the lye hunting I was able to get done. I'll be making some phone calls and spelling it out so nobody else thinks I'm looking for lime . . . maybe I'll find it and maybe I'll have to drive farther or order it.