Way Way Back Story - Sea Salt

It was great spending a few days with sister Evelyn and the folks up on Lake Superior. Every once in a while, when you spend that kind of time with your parents, you'll hear a story from their past you never heard before, even after all these years. Dad shared one of those as we watched the sun rise over the lake.

It came as I wondered aloud the difference between regular iodized salt and sea salt, with sea salt being the only kind we had in the cupboard. He chuckled when I said sea salt, I thought because of what I'd learned on the Google - that in contrast to common perception, there is no nutritional difference between the two. No, he explained with a smile because it brought back a long ago memory.

When he was first transferred to the men's prison camp in Indonesia, at the tender age of 13, he was given the job of extracting salt from the nearby dirty ocean water. He took wood off of the nearby buildings to boil the sea water to a state of evaporation. Part of the process was to throw egg shells into that water to boil the crud to the top for skimming. The albumen remaining on the shells would coagulate the dirt and contaminants, allowing the dried salt to be as clean as possible. I didn't know that about egg whites.

At that time, early in the war, he was still able to send packages and communications back to the women's prison camp, where his mother and brother remained. One such package he sent was a bottle of the sea salts he had extracted.

Years later, after the passing of his mother, he was surprised to learn that his bottle of sea salt was found in her apartment. After all those difficult years, when almost all other family possessions were lost, she had been able to hang on to that bottle of salt, bringing it all the way back to Holland. The memory brought a smile to his face these many, many years later at the mention of sea salt as being special.