However, seemingly to
the contrary, our family learned that calm, well-mannered indoor plumbing
is only a requirement if you slavishly insist on maintaining a certain
amount of self-respect while staying warm at the same time.
There was a 50-foot
well when we moved here, but naturally, that was the driest summer since
blah, blah, blah, so we had to drill a new 125-foot well up where the real
house was going to be, then run a line down to the chicken-house, an
elevation drop of about 30 feet.
We had great water pressure from
this arrangement, so much so that we scarcely had need for such items as
hand-soap, scrub brushes or paint remover.
I mentioned that we
had a septic tank installed behind the building. That's because that was
the only place for it. There was a creek on the other side, so we
literally had no choice. Just behind the septic tank, was a large
hill, causing the area where we buried the tank to have a tendency to fill
up with water during wet times, which here in the Ozarks tend to last from
November to around mid-July.
When that happened,
which it nearly always did, we not only had pretty good water pressure
from the well coming in, we also had a fairly reliable flow from the
septic tank backing up into the toilet and bathtub. When it
wasn't frozen, anyway.
During winter. The
ladies chose to tolerate these conditions, but, having a weaker stomach, I
opted to reopen the old outhouse on the other side of the hill. It wasn't
so bad, especially in comparison to spending time in the heady fumes of
the Black Lagoon and it was an excuse to get out of the house.
Another thing you may
not realize if you've not had 30-odd years to think about it, as I have,
is that chickens are not very materialistic.
Hardly any of them
owns anything of any value, and storage space is just not a major issue
among the pecking-and-scratching class. Give your typical chicken
something that will hold a little water and a few pounds of alfalfa
pellets, and he’ll consider himself well furnished.
We, on the other
hand, had a history of dissatisfaction with the norm, and possessed all
the appropriate trappings of the typical American Family of Four, formerly
known to habituate a three-bedroom suburban ranch house.
We had yer Barbie dolls, we had
yer teevee set, we had yer 5-gallon buckets of triticale flour and brown
rice. Naturally, you can't be expected to be able to place everything
quite so precisely and neatly as you once did, when you trade suburban
closets and Formica for concrete and four low walls of bare insulation.
What we wound up
doing was stacking everything along the walls and hoping that we didn't
need the stuff on the bottom too frequently.
