Times Passed Away

As my teenage son grumbled about my directive to scrub out the toilet in his bathroom, the thought ran through my head “At least you have a toilet. Heck, you have your own bathroom!” My generation may have been the last one to touch the days of no indoor plumbing. I know people up North or in California think people in Tennessee still don’t have indoor plumbing, but reality is we do. In fact, even campgrounds here in Appalachia have bathhouses now – no more using the creek or the woods for such purposes (that would be polluting the environment, you know). It’s kind of sad really, and represents a loss of some kind of perspective. You really appreciate an indoor toilet (with a warm plastic seat) when you have to use an outdoor toilet with a porcelain seat in the middle of a winter night.

Through the romantic spectacles of time, I look back to my grandparents’ house in the country in Montgomery County, TN. The time period was the early 70’s and neither of my paternal grandparents had become symptomatic of the cancer that was lurking in both of them. Typical of memories of early childhood, my recall of those few years are burnished with love and excitement, unaffected by the world events that bordered on tearing our country apart in those turbulent years. Those were good days for a child, especially a child whose regular home environment was a typical post-war suburban tract house. Ma and Pa didn’t live in suburbia. Ma and Pa lived on a farm!

It is from this farm and these few formative years that I attained my self-identity as a “country girl”. When the pace of modern life starts building tension in me, I will return in my mind to those couple of years in rural Tennessee, a time that was slower and of a different era. Thoughts of walking through Ma’s garden on the lookout for snakes, trying to avoid the itchy scratch of okra plants and corn stalks, simply make the stresses of life in the twenty-first century melt away.

How can modern society appreciate conveniences such as garbage disposals if they’ve never scraped plates into a five-gallon bucket to slop the hogs? It still seems a waste to me to flush all those leftover tidbits down the drain. There are hungry pigs in China, right? And no one appreciates air conditioning. Ma and Pa did not have air conditioning. They had a porch. You sat on the porch at night until it was cool enough to go to bed. You got up in the morning before it was too hot to get outside. Mid-afternoon was a time to sit under the oak tree and shell peas, shuck corn or just shoot the breeze while drinking a cold Co-Cola. And it was tolerable! It was normal! AC was something they had in restaurants, not in houses!

Even more interesting, Ma and Pa had an outdoor toilet – an outhouse. It was down the hill in back of the house, next to the trash pile. It was a one-holer so if someone was in there, you had to squeeze your knees and hold it until the occupant was done. That is, if you were a girl like me. My brother, dad, uncle and grandpa could just whiz across the fence into the gully if they needed to. Somehow that never seemed fair. I must admit, however, it was pretty funny when my brother accidentally peed on the electric fence by mistake. That’s not an error a girl could make, at least not sober.

The outhouse was not a pleasant place at any time. First of all, it was dark. The only light available when the door was closed came through the cracks between the boards. Because of that, I tended to use the facility with the door open to the world. That could be why I’m not all that fixated on modesty. I’d rather show my wiley than risk sitting on a snake any day.

There was another hazard of the outhouse. It had been impressed on me that snakes, especially copperheads, liked outhouses. Being biblically afraid of snakes, I took that admonition to heart and always checked under the seat before plopping down. My legs were too short to hover. Another life-long habit was developed – ability to speed-pee. I’m still the fastest in and out of a bathroom stall regardless of venue. I also still check under the seat of all public toilets. Let’s just say I’m cautious rather than paranoid.

For middle-of-the-night calls of nature, my grandma had chamber pots in each of the two bedrooms of the house. As a child of five, it was easy to hit the round, porcelain target of a chamber pot, but to this day I wonder how my extra-large size grandma ever managed to use that thing. As I creep up in years and in waist size, I have real concerns that I could manage to hit a chamber pot these days. I think of that when I stumble into my modern, warm bathroom at night. Ma must have had great balance and extraordinary strength of knees.

As I mentioned before, the outhouse was next to the trash pile. They didn’t have trash pick-up in the country back then. Everyone had a trash barrel or a trash pile away from the house where you dumped what couldn’t be fed to the pigs. Pa would burn the trash pile once a week, creating a distinctive smelling smoke that I can still identify today when wafting on the wind. I guess Pa figured the smell of the burning trash would mask the smell of the outhouse, thus the positioning of the two in the same vicinity.

One day, I was sitting on a nearby stump waiting on the outhouse to free up, while Pa burned the trash pile. Mom was in the outhouse and was taking her own sweet time. She was never a speed-pee-er like me. Suddenly, an AquaNet can overheated in the fire and exploded, shooting like a missile across the yard and whamming into the door of the outhouse like a rocket-propelled grenade. The sound of the explosion and the hollow impact with the outhouse door were deafening. Both were followed immediately by a blood-curdling scream followed by my mother bursting out of the outhouse with her britches around her knees, running full-out for the house with her white fanny shining in the sun. Pa fell out laughing and the scene is etched on the cells of my brain in crystal clarity. Mom might not have been a speed-pee-er but she was definitely a contender for the hundred-yard dash. I thought of telling that story at her funeral a couple years ago but refrained out of fear of supernatural maternal wrath.

Actually, that was the first of two times I saw my Mom make a mad dash screaming from the outhouse. The second time, she had just settled onto the porcelain thrown when a lizard ran from under the seat and up her back under her shirt. I think she broke her own record for the hundred-yard dash. It certainly made an impression on me. I always checked under the seat and left the door open after that!

Ma and Pa’s farm had many things that are pretty much lost to time now. For instance, there was a rain barrel at the corner of the house that had the coolest, clearest water you’ve ever seen. There was a tin dipper that hung on a peg on the wall beside it. The inside of the barrel was covered in green moss which I think must have worked as some kind of filter because the water was always clean. Long before water fountains or bottled water, there were rain barrels. Thirsty? Pop the top off the rain barrel and dip the dipper in for the best drink of water you ever had. No plastic to fill up a landfill!

Ma and Pa also had feather beds. Real feather beds, not the kind you get at Penney’s that lie on top of the mattress. My cousins and I would stand on the foot board of Ma’s big feather bed and do rolling dives into the feather tick. That was much better than bouncing on a spring mattress. Feather ticks envelope you whereas with a regular spring mattress you bounce. There is no bounce in a feather tick. It’s like quicksand – it just sucks you right in and it is a fight to get out.

Whenever we would go visit Ma and Pa, my parents would take the front bedroom and we grand kids would bunk with Ma and Pa in the back bedroom. There were two feather beds in there. My brother and cousin Tony bunked with Pa in one bed and my two girl cousins and I bunked with Ma in the other. Ma was a large lady and she didn’t fluff her feather bed very often. As a result, it was pretty much U-shaped with the head and foot being higher than the middle. Tuck Ma in there with us three girls and you had quite a load. And it was definitely an unbalanced load. No matter where we kids were in the bed, we’d roll toward Ma. You didn’t want to be the one on the inside because you ended up getting squished between a cousin and Ma’s big hind-end. That could be a dangerous position in a feather bed. You could smother!

Bunking with Ma was still better than bunking with Pa. Pa was devious. He would lie in bed with my brother and cousin and read them the funny paper. Just at the good part, Pa would pause and say “Was that a spider I felt on my leg?” Of course, the boys would dive under the covers looking for the spider only to discover that Pa had farted big-time and was leading them into an ambush. With screams of “Woowee!” and “Oh gosh! That’s awful!” they would evacuate the bed and stand there shivering in their pj’s while we females in the other bed giggled. I never could figure out why they couldn’t see it coming because Pa never changed his tactics yet they fell for it every time. The prospect of smothering in the feather bed while squished against Ma was much better than the absolute certainty of getting gassed by Pa in his.

Not only did Ma and Pa’s house no have air conditioning, but the only heat it had was the coal fireplaces in the bedrooms and living room. Pa would stoke the coal high when we went to bed but by morning, it was cold as a well digger’s butt in those rooms. The linoleum floors were always chilly in the winter and the only truly warm room was always the kitchen. In fact, more living was done in Ma’s kitchen than in any other room of the house except maybe the front porch. The kitchen was the warm heart of that tiny four-room house.

Ma’s kitchen is where we would get our Saturday night baths in the winter. Pa would haul in the number three washtub from its peg on the back porch and Ma would fill it with water hauled from the well and heated up on the stove. We took baths in the order of age, oldest to youngest. Being the youngest, I always got the yucky water. It was also the coldest by the time I got to it. No playing with Barbie and her boat in Ma’s tub. You got in, washed, and got out!

Summer baths were better and in a different location – the back porch. Instead of heating water, summer baths were water hauled straight from the well. Because there was no heating involved, the tub could be emptied between bathers. When I watch HGTV now and someone has an outdoor shower constructed that cost them thousands, I always think a number three washtub on the back porch would have been a lot cheaper.

Ma and Pa’s farm was a sharecropper farm. They rented and worked it, but for a time before they got sick, they both also worked at a factory in the nearby town. On the farm, they raised tobacco and Ma had a vegetable garden where she grew all the normal stuff like corn, tomatoes, okra, etc. Pa raised some pigs and goats and kept bees. There was an orchard and grapevines behind the house. Ma always canned stuff and had a pantry stuffed with Ball jars. It was a veritable cornucopia of self-sufficiency.

I wish I had had more years there to learn gardening and canning and how to operate Ma’s treadle sewing machine. Ma and Pa both fell to cancer within just a few months of each other and the farm was left to my memories. Those few years of monthly weekend visits and summer vacations made a huge impression on me. They serve as a dividing line in my mind between “old times” and “modern years”.

Most people would probably have categorized Ma and Pa as poor country folk, but I think they were the richest people on earth. They certainly imparted a mindset to me that is still with me forty years later. Their farm was a virtual play land for a youngster, populated with cows, pigs, goats, beagles and chickens. Memories I treasure were forged there during those few years I remember. And I never take an indoor toilet for granted!