The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

When I was a little sprout, we would make the pilgrimage back to my parents’ homes in Northern Maine. If Maine conjures up visions of lobstermen and weathered Cape Cod clapboard houses on the rugged Atlantic coast, let me disillusion you. Northern Maine is not scenic, not postcard picture whatsoever. It is poor, mostly peas and potato fields where the Great Northwoods threatens to reclaim its territory, some logging and plenty of drinking. Like a lot of America in the harshest climates, it belongs to another era.

Our grandparents’ houses, most of the time we went back, lacked indoor bathrooms. On my dad’s side, there was an attached shed off the kitchen and further off that was a two seater outhouse, which, if you want to be accurate, was sort of an indoor outhouse, something I’ve never seen before or since. My mom’s folks’ farmhouse sported an outdoor outhouse, one seater. They were potato farmers, living hand to mouth, and most of Gramp’s carpentry went into additions for the kids they kept having, not, apparently, for fancy double hole outhouses. That, or they were more private in their restroom etiquette.

What we had when we visited was a thundermug. You see em in antique stores now, usually an enameled metal pot with a lid but sometimes porcelain for the Martha Stewart crowd of the early last century. When we came to the South End, we had a working indoor toilet, something folks usually inquired about before they visited the first time, relieved we were so newfangled modern. But our stairs to the bedroom was nearly vertical so I did what my grandfolks did, I kept a chamber pot up there, emptied it every morning, no need to brave those skinny stairs you had to turn sideways to ascend or descend.

The last year or so the toilet in the shack kept backing up. I’m not going to shock you with tales of the attempted repairs, but I finally gave up. We had a few visitors (and ourselves) who stayed down there with apologies for the non-functioning toilet, but hey, here’s the thundermug, save you an accident on those stairs, no need to thank me. Which, I guess, might explain the diminishing number of guests this year.

But I digress. The point is, and yeah, I plan to get to it, the point is I finally decided to return to the 21st century whatever it took. Today I dragged out the old antique model and hauled in a new crapper, one that advertised itself as ‘pressurized’, whatever that means, but what I hoped would mean the contents of the bowl would rocket out at the speed of sound to somewhere else, not just swirl around and possibly flood over the rim like in the past. To be honest, my expectations of success were low. To be totally honest, I didn’t think I had a rat’s chance, but I really hate to admit to defeat and I really hated to go back to using my outhouse back in the woods, not that I mind, mind you, I just remember the woman who came to a studio tour a dozen years ago, desperate to use the loo that was out of order and ended up back in our spider infested one seater back in the nettle forest. Believe me, I never want to see a look on anyone’s face like hers when she was done. Some folks appreciate their modern luxuries. As you can see, I was doing this for them.

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