Abstract

I DIDN'T EXPECT to be an antique at forty-six, but it all seems to have worked out that way. The geographical and social circumstances of my early years are such that I find myself remembering things that few of my contemporaries and none of my juniors seem to recall. Clearly, then, I must be at least twentyfive years older than I thought, contemporary with my elders. Together with my elders-and our number grows fewer each year, threatening the loss from our culture of certain artifacts known only to our dwindling memory-together, I was saying, with my elders, I remember the outhouse. The outhouses I have known best were structures ordinarily of wood, about five feet square, standing some six feet high in front, the roof slanting downward to a rear wall of maybe four and one-half feet. The two sides were sometimes decorated with designs cut into the wood, the crescent moon and the diamond being the most widely favored figures. In some instances, the door was so decorated rather than the walls, and in a few instances, both the two sides and the door were adorned, though the discriminating thought that made entirely too busy an effect. The outhouses of my memory were almost all of the grey-brown achieved by weathering on unpainted wood. Some few, to be sure, were painted, but it seemed an affectation, and I recall that if, on a Halloween night, the choice presented itself to a group of boys between a painted and a weathered outhouse, there was no contest as to which got toppled over. When I was young and all of the family gathered on Christmas at my grandparents' farm, the outhouse there was the center piece for an annual entertainment. It was the custom of all the gathered cousins-I don't know how many there were, and I believe that on two different occasions strangers joined the gathering-to spend a portion of one morning chunking rocks at the outhouse when it was occupied. This was a game that required both skill in the throwing arm and keen judgment, for some of the adults wouldn't do as targets. Aunt Edith, for example, and Aunt Willie Mae were both entirely too gentle and