M Stevens-David
Outhouse Rules
By Martha Stevens-David
Oct 13, 2008 - 12:30:55 PM

In all his years of married life, there was only one place where Dad wasn't bothered by anyone, with the exception of flies, midges, mosquitoes, moose flies, deerflies and spiders. Dad, overwhelmed and outnumbered by his family, besides mother there were five girls and three boys, escaped to this quiet retreat as often as he possibly could.

Dad loved this rectangular little three foot by four foot room that was located at the far end of our wood shed. He'd had very little to say about the decoration of our modest home's interior but he'd had a lot to do with the decoration of his favorite out-door room.

The right hand wall didn't have a window that opened but it did have a small pane of glass set into the wall on the right side and this window afforded Dad a look across the Aroostook River at Garfield where he'd grown-up and the western horizon beyond. When sitting down, if he raised his head a little, Dad could easily see what was going on around him and still not be seen by anyone else.

When we'd first moved into the old house after our home on the Masardis Road had burned, mother made sure that Dad cleaned out and repaired the outhouse right away. He'd ripped off the one-seater and lovingly installed a brand new toilet seat. He'd carefully measured the diameter of the hole and then proceeded to saw out the circle. Then he nailed the rough-sawn pine into place and sanded the edge of the hole with sandpaper until the wood was as smooth as a new baby's bottom. The new toilet seat was a work of art.

Because the house was only used by harvest workers and had been vacant for several years, cleaning out the toilet wasn't nearly as bad a job as Dad had thought. And once he'd done that job, he filled an empty coffee can with lime and sprinkled it into the hole beneath the seat. The lime cut the smell and kept the toilet sweet and clean smelling. Then he'd taken a coat hanger and after bending it several times, hooked it on a nail in the wall about an arm's length away. This held the roll of toilet paper, if we had any, nice and secure. Otherwise, we used the torn out pages from the Montgomery Ward's or the Sears & Roebuck catalog. Mother said that it was nice that since we couldn't afford to buy anything from those catalogues, that we'd found a good use for them anyway.

The new toilet seat was just wide enough on one end to accommodate Dad's collection of Field & Stream, Argosy and Mainely Hunting magazines. In the corner on the floor, he'd placed an empty coffee tin which he half-filled with water to extinguish his Chesterfield cigarette butts in.

Dad loved this little room and throughout the years, he spent many happy hours there. He often thought to himself that there was "something about an outhouse that keeps a man on an even keel." In the winter it was a different story however. Dad didn't spend any more time than necessary in his little retreat. The back of the toilet faced north and when the wind-driven snow came swirling up through the toilet seat hole in strong gusts, one didn't tarry in that spot too long. Dad said that when the mercury was hovering around twenty degrees below zero, a strong gust of wind-driven snow coming up through the toilet hole might jist have dire consequences on certain parts of the male anatomy.

Every so often this innocuous looking room was the cause of prolonged and heated "discussions" at our house. Every now and then, mother would get on one of her cleaning binges and she'd tackle the outhouse with a vengeance and Lord help anything or anyone that got in her path.

Mother's favorite saying was "We may be poor but we're not dirty!" or "Soap's cheap!" She'd tear-up an old towel for her favorite mop, fill her scrub pail with boiling water, dump in half a bottle of Lestoil or bleach and head for that hallowed place. She'd slather the detergent-filled mop around the ceiling and walls and give them a good scrubbing and then she'd scrub the toilet seat and floor with a big, stiff pig-bristle brush dipped in household bleach.

After she'd given everything a twice over with the pail of scrub water, she scurry back to the kitchen for another pail of boiling water. She'd rush back to the outhouse and give everything a final rinse. Once the small room was clean and dry and the window had been wiped clean, she'd arrange Dad's favorite magazines at the far end of the seat and place a new cigarette butt can in the corner. "There," she'd say to herself, "Now it's nice and fresh smelling." Over the years, whenever the decoratin impulse overcame her, she'd been tempted to hang a sweet little ruffled curtain over Dad's outhouse window but one brief mention of this idea to Dad and that was the end of that. Dad said that about the time anyone hung a curtain in his shit house, there was going to be hell to pay and he meant what he said.

The one thing that she'd forget was that Dad didn't mind having everything nice and clean but he hated the smells of Lestoil and bleach. The minute his feet hit the porch, his usually good humored nature would slide just a little bit sideways and his Swedish Steven's nose would tell him that mother had been cleaning his room again and the "discussion" would begin.

"Don't you have enough ta do all day with the house, the garden and the kids without messing-up my outhouse?" Dad would query. Mother taking immediate offense to the word "messing-up" would get her dander up and the war would begin. We always knew that whenever Dad had somehow offended mother and her sense of cleanliness, the out house was going to receive a lot of extra attention in the next few days. After all the years of their marriage, mother should have learned the age old lesson by now, that a man and his outhouse can't be parted.

Copyright (1st Rights) retained by Martha Stevens-David 2002. She can be reached at lmdmsd@megalink.net.