Grandma Henke

Alice’s blog on Out house Trivia reminded me of Dad’s ingenious out house on our property at Bear Lake back in the 1960′s. The property was without improvements of any kind … mostly sand and some brush. To stay there for a week at a time meant we needed some place private to … you know what. Our first trip there Dad bought a porta-potty and for the privacy part he brought along the giant box our new refrigerator had come in. It seemed like a great idea until we could get a regular out house up.

He put it up by the only tree on the property, which happened to be fairly close, maybe twenty feet, down the slope from the highway. I was about sixteen at the time and it was a little disconcerting to actually do what needed done inside this large box. It wasn’t a place anyone would have taken reading material into, that’s for sure.

My older brother was making a visit to “The Box” one afternoon when a semi truck went by on the highway above and the wind from it blew the box up and away, slick as a whistle, and there was Bill sitting on the porta-potty right in the great outdoors with his pants down around his ankles.