In-House Outhouse

I grew up hearing my mom tell about life with her grandma and grandpa. This was the 1930s when frugality was not simply a lifestyle choice. She remembers watching her grandpa make laundry detergent and her grandma making cottage cheese.

Even after her own mother paid to have electricity wired to their house, my great-grandparents sat in the dark at night so as not to spend the money on lighting.

My mom told of using the outhouse at her grandma and grandpa's; it was just a fact of life. People really did save the old Sears & Roebuck catalogs for toilet paper, but, according to my mom, the best t.p.-of-old came from summer peaches.

Let me explain.

Summer peaches came by the box, individually wrapped in tissue paper. My mom remembers her grandparents carefully smoothing out each of those wrappers for later use in the outhouse.

My dad used to tell stories involving outhouses, too, though I'm not sure when the farmhouse in which he grew up got indoor plumbing.

He told of Halloween pranks involving disassembling an outhouse and reassembling it atop a downtown building. I seem to remember something about some unfortunate soul falling into the outhouse hole in the process...

Anyway, it's easy to wax nostalgic about days-of-old when living in the comfort of our modern houses. Though my house was built in 1904, it does have all the modern conveniences of indoor plumbing, except when it comes to heating certain rooms.

The remodeling of the kitchen and creation of a half-bath next to it helped make this old house livable, with one minor exception, that is. There was no room for a radiator in the kitchen proper, nor in the downstairs bathroom.

Most of the year this isn't a problem.

This isn't that time of year.

With temperatures below freezing, using our little half-bath becomes an arctic expedition. We can't leave the door to the bathroom open since that would only serve to lower the temperature on the main floor of the house. We also can't leave it open since a certain puppy loves to grab toilet paper and Kleenex boxes.

Michael has a nifty little temperature-assessing device he borrowed from work - it looks kind of like a ray-gun that measures the temperature of individual objects when pointed at them. Last night, while huddled at the dinner table, we decided to see just how cold our little in-house outhouse really is.

Let me tell you, it was eye-opening.

Or perhaps I should say, bun-numbing.

At 8 p.m. it was -4 degrees outside. The thermostat in the house was set at 65 degrees. But a little trip to the bathroom might have required gloves and a coat, with the air temperature measuring 41 degrees, the outside wall of the bathroom at 32 degrees, the floor at 34 degrees, and, get this - the toilet seat at 39 degrees!

Now, to lend an additional measure of perspective here, someone suggested measuring the temperature of my, um, rear. Always game for an experiment, Michael and I stepped into the other room, I bent over, he pointed the thermo-gun, and, well, we came up with a butt-temp of 83 degrees, sans jeans.

This massive temperature differential prompted my eldest to proclaim, "It's lucky mom's butt doesn't fracture."

Indeed.

So, when you're feeling a little chilly in your house, thinking maybe you'll nudge that thermostat up a degree or two, I urge you to think of your forebears and the long journeys undertaken in all weather to the "necessary."

Or you can just think of me.

And my really, really cold rear.