Double Seater Outhouse

The older I get, the more nostalgic I grow.  One of my New Year's resolutions was to learn one new thing about my mom every time I called her. I thought it would be tough - surely I knew everything there was to know about her, I mean seriously, she's my mom.  Hasn't she told me everything that could possibly be told?  The short answer: no.

There are things my mom considered so ordinary (that were in fact extraordinary) that she failed to mention them along the way.  Here's a few:

 My mom was born in 1942.  She never had an indoor toilet until she was fifteen years old.

Fifteen.  Think of going through middle school with no bathroom in your house.

 "I'll never forget when Daddy finally built us the double seater," she said in the course of this conversation.

Let's pause right there.  Join hands and gather with me around this mental image of the double seater outhouse.  Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Who do you take with you to the double seater outhouse?  Do you decide to go together and if you do - what is that conversation like?  Or does one knock and then just come on in and join you on the wood?  And if they do...do you scoot over a little to make room? (Did I just say do do?) And if you do scoot over, would you get a splinter?

Who do you love (or despise) enough to let into the double seater outhouse with you?  Are there unwritten rules regarding the double seater?  Do you make eye contact?  Have conversations?

"Mom, who would go with you??" 

"My little sisters," she replied.  Of course. Come to think of it, I think that's about the only person I would head to the double seater with myself.

My mom had a cow named Tootsie. As if that's not priceless enough, she got to milk it every morning.  Not for fun or for 4H but because they needed milk for breakfast...and butter.

"Mom would strain it through a cheese cloth and we'd drink it while it was still warm.  With some peaches,"  she informed me. (Note to self: google 'cheese cloth').

That's right.  My mom was organic before organic was cool.

"Then we'd let it sour in the churn and churn it with the dasher for a while till the cream rose to the top.  Mom would pour it into the butter mold." (Note to self: google 'dasher').

That's right.  My mom was organic AND practically Amish.  

"Sometimes, if I didn't want to use the the double seater, I'd sneak to my Aunt Arzie's up the hill and use her outhouse," she explains.  

What did Aunt Arzie have that my mom didn't?  

Toilet paper. They were big time. No Sear's catalog in their outhouse. 

"Aunt Arzie never caught me," my mom continued....

That's right. My mom was an organic, Amish Ninja.

"What did you do about a bath?" I had to ask because I secretly wanted to use the information against my daughter somehow to explain that she didn't need a two hour shower every day.

"We had a tin tub," she said.  (Just as I had hoped!)

"In the winter we filled it with two kettles of hot water and one of cold and we'd get to bathe inside.  In the summer we bathed outside.  We filled it in the morning and let the sun heat it up all day."

That's right.  My mom was an organic, Amish, Ninja, Exhibitionist , Naturalist.

My grandfather never finished the house my mom was raised in.  During World War II all supplies were cut off.  He couldn't get metal or sheet rock.

"I had no ceilings.  Just the rafters," she said.  "And there was no fascia on the window sill. When it snowed, it came right into my room and settled there on the ledge."

"What did you do?" I asked.

"Got a spoon and ate it," she replied.

My mom was an LPN in the labor and delivery department during desegregation.

"If a black laboring mom came in, she'd have to have the baby in the hall on a stretcher. Usually me and the nurse would deliver it.  The doctor would just come by and sign the paper work.  They wouldn't give them a room.  So I would always sneak extra gowns and diapers into their going home bag.  And when I made my rounds with the juice, I went to them first there in the hall so there would still be some good cranberry juice to choose from.  Eventually they told us to put the black babies by the white babies near the viewing window.  We had to line them up: Black, white, black, white.  This mountain man came in and complained.  He told me to get his baby away from the blacks.  So I took his baby and rolled it into the back of the line where no one could see it."

That's right.  My mom was an organic, Amish, Ninja, Naturalist, Civil Rights Activist. 

And this, friends, is after ONE conversation.  It's going to be an enlightening year.

Before she hung up she shared with me my grandmother's favorite song.  I never thought about my Grandma appreciating music.  It made me smile.

"She ran to the radio and would turn it up when this song came on," she told me.

(Note to self: Google "Red River Valley"..........and play it endlessly.)

For more wisdom from my incredible mom, read the post she left on my daughter's facebook: "When I was 14" or read her article about life in the foothills of North Carolina in Mature Living Magazine
(page16-17)