- published: 12 Apr 2008
- views: 1429063
Whitewash, or calcimine, kalsomine, calsomine, or lime paint is a low-cost type of paint made from slaked lime (calcium hydroxide, Ca(OH)2) and chalk (calcium carbonate, (CaCO3), sometimes known as "whiting". Various other additives are also used.
Whitewash cures through a reaction with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to form calcium carbonate in the form of calcite, a reaction known as carbonation.
It is usually applied to exteriors; however, it is traditionally used for interiors in food preparation areas, particularly rural dairies, for its mildly antibacterial properties. Occasionally it is coloured and used on structures such as the hallways of apartment buildings, but it is not popular for this as it can rub off onto clothing to a small degree. In Britain and Ireland, whitewash was used historically, for both interiors and exteriors, in workers' cottages, and still retains something of this association with rural poverty. In the United States, a similar attitude is expressed in the old saying: "Too proud to whitewash and too poor to paint".
Old layers of time have buried the ways that the others
have grown
And though sturdy and strong his eyes open wide with
each new unknown
And O it’s for the earth that he screams in the night
He’s a servant of the seasons and the morning’s early
light
But the troubled one he says
CHORUS
Rescue me he says rescue me
On this mountain‘s the only place I can see clearly
Rescue me, rescue me
On this mountain’s the only place I can see clearly
He says rescue me
And see these guilty hands that envenom the soil and
take the like from his fields
But now these book-reddened eyes have discovered the
truth and what it conceals
And O it’s for the earth that he screams in the night
He’s a servant of the seasons and the morning’s early
light
But the troubled one he says
CHORUS
And so the plough it will turn and our hearts they will
burn for sair works nae easy
But O this circle stone and this buzzard dyke and this
great unknown
It goes on and on into the distance of time
And O it’s for the earth that we scream in the night
We’re servants of the seasons and the mornings early
light
But the troubled ones they say
CHORUS