Change is one thing you can rely on

Life is full of changes, and they hit at an early age.

I was born on a farm outside Palouse, and we didn’t have indoor plumbing. Our facility was located about 25 yards from the house and alongside our parking area.

It was a two-hole outdoor toilet.

I could never figure out why we had a two-hole toilet? I guess I never felt like I knew anyone well enough to sit there with another person beside me. We didn’t have toilet paper, only a Sears Roebuck catalog. You get the picture?

One of my greatest fears is that I would fall in.

Now nighttime and in the winter things changed a bit. We had a porcelain bedside pot for nighttime use and if it was too cold to go outside. Our morning duty was always to empty and wash the pot out.

Didn’t have water in the house, so we had to pump water from the well located near our back door. We always had a bucket of water on standby in case we had to prime the pump. 

We didn’t have electricity in the house or barn, so we had to use kerosene lanterns.

This was standard fare until I was 6 and we moved into town so I could start the first grade.

There, we had an indoor toilet and a cold-water faucet. For hot water, my mother had to heat water for baths and other uses atop our old Monarch wood stove. Baths were Saturday mornings in the middle of the kitchen in a large galvanized tub. We also had electricity, and my dad purchased a small Philco radio.

This was standard until we moved into a larger house on Church Street. We were moving up in the world, and I was experiencing another welcome change.

In the new place we had hot water and a separate and formal dining room with a wide door that slid into the wall.

My mother started having people over occasionally for dinner.

That’s where we got our first phone, a 10-house party line.

Your phone ring would be like two long and one short rings.

People would listen in on other people’s calls, so there were no secrets. We stayed a couple of years there and then returned to the farm where I would live until my freshman year in high school.

Everything changed on the farm where we had all the convenience I left behind in town.

A person’s life is filled with change. The difference between then and now is that changes come more rapidly and have greater significance.

It would be great to know more of the changes that we will see in the next few years, but nothing is more memorable than that two-hole outdoor toilet and the banging of the lid of that porcelain pot.