it brings back so many memories.
We too had an outhouse and I never much thought about it. It was just the way it was and many of our friends had the same. We lived in a small town and our house was just a basement for 12 years. I can remember pumping the water outside too!
When I think about the outhouse I think of the smell. My parents dumped lime down the hole from time to time but it was always there.. And of course the dang RATS. It was almost impossible to keep them out. We used poison but they would just come back. The problem was that if the neighbors didn't kill theirs, they would just come to ours in a few days.
The dang rats would dig tunnels all over the place and we would try toj dround them out but it just didn't work.
My dad finally backed the old car into the area and hooked up a hose to the exhaust. Stuck the hose into one of the tunnels and let it run. By golly that worked better than anything. It got the adults and the babies in the nests, I guess. They would come back but it took a while.
I remember the winters, using that dang thing. I would to out there and drop the drawers and then hold myself up off the seat. I would then bounce up and down to slowly heat the dang thing up because it is hard to do your business of you are not relaxed.
Speaking of relaxing. Summer was worse. Spiders AND rats!!
You would set there, trying to relax and hear the little suckers scurring around down there and it was hard to get things a going. The dang spiders were also all over the place too. I would set there and just look around and there were webs in the peak and up the corners. Your bare butt was a hanging down over the dang Rats and a slight breeze would scurry around down there and touch the dang hairs on your rear and you would think "SPIDER" I jumped up off that dang old seat a hundred times but here was never no dang spider but it sure didn't stop me from jumping.
Bob Jones was one of my buddies. I really liked Bob because he was the only kid in our area that I could wup. He was a skinny sucker back then and that got him in trouble. For some reason he was standing on seat of our outhouse, looking through the vent hole and he fell in. That boy squalled like a mashed cat. So did his mother when he finally walked into the kitchen, crying and covered to his waste in Ottmars crap.
One thing we used to do, usually in July and if we could scrape a little money together to buy some Fire crackers from Doug Kennedy, was blast turds. Now I guess you have to be a boy without a TV to find the enjoyment in this but we would go out there and light the suckers off and throw them down the hole. Man what a mess and I got my butt paddled more than once because of it.
We lived at the bottom of a hill and on Holloween kids would run down the hill and dump the outhouse. They thought it was fun but my dad didn't. It was always after dark when they did it and my dad would have to go out and set it up again.
One Holloween they dumped it and my dad went out and uprighted it again but NEXT to the hole, on off side with the hole between the outhouse and the hill.
We went into the house and turned off the lights. We looked out the window,which was a little basement window and waited.
It did not take long and we heard the yelling. They seemed to have to do this before tipping one of them over. We gathered around and watched and all of a sudden the yelling stopped and then got worse. I think there were three of the dang fools in that hole full of crap and we ran out and were all laughing so hard that they got out on their own and got away. I am not sure if my dad wanted to catch them anyway.
Yes, your mention of the outhouse brought back many memories.
