I don't want this group to die

Hence this post.

Agreed!

I overheard a conversation about outhouses today while visiting an event at a park. A young man was regaling his sister with Too Much Information about their construction and function.

I then had to go to the outhouse myself. Well, to a blue plastic movable booth which appeared bigger on the inside than on the outside (that seems eerily familiar), seeming to contain a vast cesspool of unknown depth. Not a good reading light, either.

ROFL! I really am not fond of port-a-johns, but I guess it beats squatting in the shrubbery.

Growing up, we used to visit my grandmother in her little house in New Mexico. She had moved there with my grandfather from an even smaller town just after the war. The place had all the amenities, but my grandfather refused to use the indoor plumbing, so he had an outhouse installed in a corner of the backyard.

My grandfather died when I was an infant, but when we would visit, I would ask about the overgrown little building out back, and my grandmother would say it was "granddad's house". She made it sound like he was still inside of it, and it freaked the living crap out of me. I don't think I ever worked up the nerve to look inside.

As an addendum: Years later, I used to work with a historical archaeologist. His first order of business at a new site was to locate the site of the former outhouse, because that was where all the "good stuff" was. It was always the new guys on the crew that got the "honor" of excavating that particular spot.

I once worked on a site in rural Poland (the town was too small even to be on a 1 x 1 m map of just Poland). The outhouses were on stilts; each morning straw was strewn over the pile, and when the pile reached the floor of the outhouse the 'house was picked up and moved to another location where the process was repeated. There were three flocks of poultry (chickens, guinea fowl, and I forget the third) that circumnavigated the farm in 3-hour periods, each flock about an hour between the others. When passing the outhouses the birds would look for...things...in the piles beneath. It happened once or twice in the month I was there that an unfortunate person using the outhouse at such a time received a peck in the exposed portion of their anatomy.