by Tracy Hensley Bumpus
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 the 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 70s 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 the 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 – the 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 throne 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 featherbeds. Real featherbeds, not the
kind you get at Penney’s that lie on top of the mattress. My cousins and I
would stand on the footboard of Ma’s big featherbed and do rolling dives into
the feather tick. That was much better than bouncing on a spring mattress.
Feather ticks envelop 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 grandkids would bunk with Ma and Pa in the back
bedroom. There were two featherbeds 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 featherbed 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 featherbed 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 from the coal fireplaces in the bedrooms and warm morning
stove in the 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 playland 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!
Originally published in 2010
