When I was four years old my family and I got the terrible news that my maternal grandmother had died.  We lived in Florida at the time but immediately packed up to go back home to New Hampshire.  We ended up living in my grandmother’s house which was where my mother had grown up. The house was quite old and didn’t have all the amenities we were used to.  Water was pumped into the kitchen sink by an old red handled hand pump mounted to the side of the metal sink, the refrigerator had the freezer on the bottom and the “bathroom” was outside and was called an outhouse.

You went out the back door in the kitchen and up a small hill to get to the outhouse. For a four year old who really had to go this could be quite a trip.  However, my father was quite a jack-of-all-trades and in the first year he had built a small bathroom in the master bedroom. 

Of course, upon completion of the new bathroom, my father felt it important to tear down the outhouse.   So one sunny morning he started out the door with his hammer to do just that.  My mother looked at him and said, “You might want more than that.  In my father’s day they built things good.”  My father just shrugged and went out the door with his hammer.  It wasn’t long before he came back in and got a bigger hammer.   My mother just looked at him and said, “Yup, in those days, they built things good.” 

After listening to my father hammer for quite a while, my mother and we kids wandered out to see how my father was getting along.  He showed us the one board he had managed to remove from the inside of the outhouse.  My father ,never a man to admit defeat,  went and got his wrecking  bar and tried prying off some of the boards.  I am pretty sure this is where the curses started.  It didn’t help, neither the cursing nor the wrecking bar, as none of the boards were removed.  My mother repeated her fact that “they made things better back then” but not loud enough for my father to hear this time.  She then proceeded to back us children up.  My father had gone to start the truck.

In those days we had a big old GMC work truck with a wooden bed.  It was a monster of a truck that was hard to start and when it did start it belched out the blackest of smoke, but it was definitely powerful.   My father hitched a logging chain to the back of the truck with the other end attached to the outhouse, and after some belching and sputtering he got the truck rolling.  My mother backed us up a bit more and squinted her eyes.  When the truck ran out the slack on the chain there was a tremendous snap and then a sharp cracking noise.  The truck stopped quick and my father jumped out.  He looked back to the back window of the truck with a look of amazement on his face.  We crept forward until we could see that the chain had broken and the end had snapped forward and broken the back window of the truck.  We looked back at the outhouse, there is stood, still perfect.  My father did quite a bit more cursing and went to look for a new chain.  My mother told us we were to come indoors but I went to the kitchen to look out the wavy window in the back door.  My father hooked up the chain again and this time pulled a little less aggressively with the truck.  The wheels on the truck spun and dug down in the dirt but after a few moments the outhouse did start to move.  It moved from the spot it had stood on all those years but it stayed whole and in shape.  I watched my father stop the truck, get out and look at the outhouse standing there still as solid as could be, and he just shook his head.  He got back in the truck and pulled the outhouse all the way out past the garden and then up the road that we had made up the hills behind the house where we got out winter wood.  There he finally set fire to the outhouse up on the hill as the only way to get rid of it. 

When my father finally finished the job and returned to the house my mother just looked at him.  He looked up wiped the sweat from his forehead and said, “I never would have thought they made things that  good back then.” She just turned away and smiled.  It was the closest my father ever came to saying, “ You were right.”

Rebecca Whitford