« Alzheimer’s Disease | Main | The Dentist »

Thursday, 24 February 2011

Outhouses I Have Known

By Lyn Burnstine of The Lynamber Times

I have no fondness for the outhouses I have known even though intimacy was definitely a part of the relationships. In the summers at my grandma’s farm, I was always afraid of the red wasps that buzzed around the inside of the roof.

Outhouses in summer in hot climates were miserable places to be, especially if your purpose there involved more than a quick visit. The only ventilation was provided by the small cutout windows high up on the walls, unless you were lucky enough to be able to leave the door open.

Since the door faced the house, I only did that when certain that nobody but family was around and company not apt to arrive suddenly. There was often an old catalog in the corner, but, at least when my parents were in residence on the farm, we always had real toilet paper.

Allegedly, before there were catalogs, there were corn cobs in that very facility. Well, they were biodegradable!

Our winter homes — several, small-town, Main Street apartments over the years — had the luxury of some level of indoor plumbing. Not again till we moved back to the country year-round, when I was in the eighth grade, did the specter of an outhouse and all it implied raise its ugly head.

We had not yet had much experience using a freezing cold outdoor bathroom all winter till we moved there. It was bad enough to have to sit with a bare bottom hanging over frigid open air, but guess who the lucky one was that got to empty the nighttime slop jars — thunder mugs, we called them.

My grandmother, by then, had difficulty getting around and my mother saw herself as a hothouse flower who couldn’t do heavy chores. And it was a fair distance out to the outhouse from the house, for obvious reasons having to do with the olfactory factor.

My father was busy from early morning till night, sandwiching a full-time teaching job in between the morning and evening chores of caring for a substantial herd of milk cows, pigs and chickens. All this was in addition to church and school evening meetings, all the family grocery shopping, and helping with cooking and other household chores.

I felt so bad that he had to work that hard, especially at times when he wasn’t feeling well, but his code of ethics did not include letting his “girls” do the heavy farm work for him: milking, hauling hay and mucking out the barn stalls.

So I probably didn’t complain too loudly about feeding and watering my own livestock — a small herd of sheep — or of emptying the buckets of nighttime effluent.

My problem was that I was smitten with a neighbor boy — the handsome Dennis — and lived in dread of being seen by him as I did that nasty chore. I tried to avoid that mortification by listening carefully for the putt-putt of his motorbike before starting down the path, then being prepared to duck down out of sight behind some bushes if I misjudged the time I had to maneuver from the house to the privy and back.

Happily for all, in the second year we lived there, my father installed running water, plumbing and a tiny shower, sink and toilet in a former pantry.

I went away to college, married, had children — all that time enjoying real bathrooms with real bathtubs. I became a folksinger; my husband, kids and I began to go to folk festivals which involved camping, which involved — you guessed it — OUTHOUSES!

The Fox Hollow Festival in Petersburg, New York, became an important part of each summer. A new outhouse, then a second, were built on the grounds. Songs were written in homage to them. Dedications complete with poetry, pomp and circumstance were held, including a naming ceremony.

Intertanglefolkinlockinwood was a magnificent specimen: a three-holer on the women’s side; a three-holer on the men’s side. (For those few of you who might not know – Tanglewood and Interlochen are two fine summer institutes of music — the first in Massachusetts, the second in Michigan.)

It had the best graffiti ever written — each entry inspired grander literary effort. One would linger to read the new entries and exit laughing. It was the first time I had been able to see the humor connected with an outhouse since back in my high school years, when my father got even with the kids who would drive the four miles out to our farm to try and tip over the outhouse at Halloween.

He simply moved the building back a few feet, then shot a rifle into the air when he heard the boys swearing as they realized they might fall in the hole rather than us — their targeted prey. Reports were that some of the boys ran the whole way back to town!

I hope that is the end of my story, but it may not be. My country-dweller sister has seen a big black bear snooping around her outhouse, even standing up against the side trying to peek in the window.

So here I am again, still afraid — with a police whistle clutched in my hand instead of a flyswatter and the door wide open to make a quick getaway if the bear comes near.

---

[INVITATION: All elders, 50 and older, are welcome to submit stories for this blog. They can be fiction, non-fiction, poetry, memoir, etc. Instructions for submitting are here.]

Posted by Ronni Bennett at 05:30 AM | Permalink | Email this post

The comments to this entry are closed.