When I was growing up, just about everyone I knew still had outdoor toilets. You could kind of judge people by their toilets. The shiftless, don't much care kind usually built theirs on a slope and let the waste pile up and tumble down the hillside.
My mama said that in her day, men came around town in a "Honey Wagon"and shoveled out the waste of the people in town.
The more industrious people dug pits underneath their toilets and from time to time put in lime to keep the odors down. My daddy built us a very fine toilet. He dug a deep pit and poured a cement floor around it. He took a big piece of pipe and embedded one end into the floor and on the other end he fitted a wooden seat just like the ones in the restrooms at the picture show. It even had a lid to let down.
The seat was very comfortable and you could sit and think your thoughts away from the noisy house. There was a bit of newpaper on the floor which had a story about a horse who fell into a cistern. The paper lay there for months and to this day everyone still living in my family can tell you nearly word for word about the horse and the struggle the people had getting him out.
It was very nice when we got a real bathroom, but I kind of missed the little house inside the pasture down across the road. I missed feeling the heat of summer and the occasional sound of gentle rain on the rusty tin roof. I missed the cold of winter and the sound of the blustering wind blowing around the corners and through the boards. I missed the nosing around of the old cow who came to the door as if to say hello. And best of all, we never had to clean it.
