Ahhh, country living

My husband and I live in the country. We have neighbors, but can't see their houses from our house. On a clear night with a full moon, we usually hear the coyotes howling on the edge of our woods. We've lost more than one of our dogs to them in the past. Even though we have our problems with country living, I love it and wouldn't want to live anywhere else.

What problems, you ask? Well, let's see. During the wind storm we had several years ago, actually Hurricane Ike, but we don't have hurricanes in Indiana, so many trees fell in our yard, we had to put my truck in 4-wheel drive and drive it over our elevated sidewalk and through the yard around all the downed trees in order to get out. We came home from vacation once and found that a neighbor's horse had eaten every stalk of corn in our garden.

In the winter, our roads are the last to get the snow cleared off of them by the county highway department. Usually, the neighbors get their tractors out and clear the snow first. The water pipes in our house tend to freeze when the temps get down in to the single digits. But, what I think is the worst is when our spring stops running and we have no water. That's the problem right now. We're in such a drought that our spring has stopped producing water. When that happens, we have to have a load of water hauled in. Sometimes it takes a few days for our delivery to get here. When we are out of water, we cannot flush the toilet. All I can say is thank goodness the previous owners had the sense to put an outhouse out back. Ours is not the traditional wooden outhouse with the moon cut in the door. Ours is a little more substantial. Hidden in the pine trees behind our house is actually a port-a-potty that is permanently set over a concrete hole in the ground.

When we moved in here, it wasn't my first experience with an outhouse. My father used to own an old gas station that was built before indoor plumbing was popular. It was also my mom and dad's home before I was born. They lived on one side of the building while the gas station/grocery store was on the other. The only bathroom was an outhouse behind the building.


That outhouse was a "two-holer," like the the photo above. I'm not sure why there were two holes. Would you really want to sit next to someone in the outhouse like that?

So, we'll be using our outhouse until our load of water shows up. It's totally private back there, well until the neighbors drive by on their driveway next to the pine trees, or until the dog sniffs his way out there and pokes his nose in through the door that won't close all of the way.

Ah yes, I still love country living. Really, I do.

Carol