Attribution: Lee Coursey from Decatur, GA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports that as the keeper reviews his life with emphasis on the events, like wars and accidents that might have ended it early on, he realizes he has not dealt with the real possibility that he could easily have been crushed by the very heavy hole cover in Uncle Ralph’s new outhouse.
It was back in the era of rare indoor plumbing on the rural landscape and regulatory efforts were in place to make outhouses as acceptable as possible, one of those regs being that new outhouses had to be made with hole covers that could not be left open.
Uncle Ralph’s new outhouse came with a hole cover made of very heavy planking that depended on the user’s back to keep it in the open—in use, position.
The keeper was a small skinny kid who was immediately and seriously intimidated by the heavy cover to the point that his “regularity” was obviously put at risk during extended Uncle Ralph visits.
That the memory of the outhouse hole cover threat has remained with the keeper over these many years likely points to a life that could have used some quality control. He will talk to Phillis about it. Or maybe not.
As he reviews it now after a long newspaper career the keeper wonders if the headline might have read, “Farm Boy Crushed To Death in Outhouse Mishap.”
