My very earliest childhood memories are vague. Until I was about four, I remember just blurred snapshots full of saturated color and texture—the crisp coolness of green, green grass beneath my feet, blue skies overhead, feeling a friend's hand in my own as we ran down the packed dirt path towards the roar of the river, slipping on the cold, mossy river rocks, and the splintery feeling of the rough wood of the outhouse seat. I don't know why that stands out in my memory and have no intention of asking Freud about it, but for one reason or another, outhouses play prominent parts in many of my young childhood memories.
The first outhouse of my childhood, I don't remember, but I've seen pictures proving its existence. My parents lived in Machaca when I was born, a tiny village four miles further into the jungle than the end of the dirt road. When they first moved there, they built an outhouse with cahun leaf walls, the same material which thatched the roof of our three-room home. These walls were later replaced with rough-cut lumber, which I remember as being the primary building material for all outhouses until we moved to The States, that magical land of flushing toilets, when I was four.
When I was very young, my mother tried to teach my brother and I a few American bathroom manners, hoping, I think, that our jungle breeding wouldn't be too obvious to our American friends. One lesson she wanted to impress upon us was this: You don't let anyone of the opposite gender see you in the bathroom. We nodded our agreement to Mom's first attempt to teach us this lesson, but a few days later, Mom decided maybe she hadn't made herself completely clear when she overheard this:
Michael: (knocks on outhouse door)
Me (from my perch inside): “It's okay, you can come in. I have my eyes closed.”
For the two years we lived in The States, I have, of course, no outhouse memories, since this was, after all, the land of flushing toilets. I also have no bathroom memories. Life must have been rather dull. But then we returned to Belize—another home, another outhouse.
The home into which we moved was composed of two houses—one a kitchen, the other living and bedrooms—and an outhouse. To reach this outhouse, one had to follow the path all the way around the kitchen, past the guava tree Irina tried to climb when she broke her arm, under the mango tree our parrot, Jo-Jo, used as a bedroom, all the way past the hibiscus, the achote bushes, and various other shrubs, to the edge of the jungle, or the bush, as we called it, where this dark, ramshackle outhouse lurked, hiding spiders, scorpions, and other frightening creatures in its smelly depths. The only light inside came though the cracks in the walls. Bad enough during the daytime, at night, the path to the outhouse could only be traversed with the safety of numbers on one's side, especially after we discovered evidence of a mama tiger and her cubs hunting in the bush behind the outhouse. The main story concerning this outhouse I cannot tell. If I did, you would probably take ill, and I would have to field death threats from various family members, and I'm just not prepared to do that yet. I'll wait until I have a really good publishing offer, and I know I'll have enough money to afford an identity change.
Things started looking up when Daddy salvaged an old guardhouse from the Voice of America broadcasting station he was building, and reincarnated it as a new outhouse. This little building became the spiffiest outhouse in the entire neighborhood; in fact, it was probably the nicest outhouse in the entire district! Made of smooth wood painted white with three—count them—three—windows, which swung open smoothly on hinges, and even when you had to shut the windows during rainy season, light came in around the top, under the eaves of the roof. The ultimately cool feature of this outhouse, though, was the big, bold, “13” stenciled in black above the door. Of course, we never used the word “cool” back then, being very un-cool, and not realizing “cool” could mean anything other than “slightly cold,” but whatever word we used to express that feeling—that 13 was it. To this day, I have no idea why that was cool, but it was. All my siblings who remember this remarkable outhouse recall the definite cool-ness of that black 13. This was also our first “two-holer” outhouse, with a big hole for big people, and a little hole with a built-in step in front for the little folks. As I'm sure you can clearly see, we had arrived at the ultimate in outhouses.
Just because we had a nice outhouse at home, though, didn't mean we always had nice outhouses to use. Most of the back villages we visited had no outhouses at all, just an expanse of bush, with lots of places to hide. The bush wasn’t bad compared to the outhouses in some villages, which usually offered corncobs in lieu of toilet paper, and bush was definitely preferable to the outhouses in town, which were the most terrifying outhouses ever. Punta Gorda was located on the shores of the Caribbean, and the good townsfolk decided to provide public bathroom facilities in the easiest manner possible, locating them right over the ocean. Completely unsanitary, yes, but the good townsfolk had bigger things to worry about, so the dilapidated public bathrooms remained open to torture small children for many years. First, you had to cross a pier, a rickety pier, with no handrails, and gaping holes where boards had rotted out. When you reached the little shacks at the end, things weren't any better. Basically, the outhouse consisted of a half-floor, a half-wall, and then empty space. I always knew I was going to fall over backwards and plunge 15 feet into the ocean and sewage below. Needless to say, we usually didn't have to go to the bathroom when we were in town. Just writing this, I am seized with an uncanny urge to grip the edges of my keyboard tightly, and I find myself holding my breath, hoping I can finish typing this before I fall through.
Back at home, our new outhouse moved with us to a new, two-story home. This time, while it was still close to the bush, the location was much closer to the house, and therefore completely un-scary. I was nine by this time, and thought fear was childish, and, since it was my responsibility to help my younger siblings grow up brave like me, when seven-year-old Irina woke me up at night to go with her to the outhouse, I told her she didn't need me to go with her. She should go by herself. Not being convinced of the wisdom of my attitude, but impressed by my bravado, she would tiptoe out and wake up five-year-old Susie to go with her instead. After we discovered a worn-down plot in the bush behind the outhouse where a burglar had observed us for several weeks before breaking into our home, I did change my tactics, and decided I wasn't too big to accompany a sibling to the outhouse after all—in fact, I was far too small, and they needed to go wake up Daddy instead.
Myron, who has since grown up and is pursuing a career in commercial aviation, was showing a keen interest in airplanes at two and three years old, which led to another outhouse episode in the pages of Yoder history. He was in the outhouse one day when he heard the roar of a harrier approaching. Knowing he had only seconds to see this airplane, he hopped off the little hole and went streaking outside. He saw the plane, but Mom saw the lack of pants, and told him next time, even if there was an airplane, he should pull his pants up before he came out. He took this lesson to heart, and a few weeks later, he came running inside—pants in place—and told Mom there was a “gween snake” in the outhouse! “But,” he assured her, “It's not thewe anymow, 'cause it came in undew the doow and then cwawled up the wall and out the window. I was going to come tell you wight away, but I couldn't, 'cause I had to put my pants on fiwst.”
That was the last outhouse we ever owned. When I was 11, we moved to The States for good, leaving outhouses and tigers and guava trees behind forever. Like I said, we won't tell Freud about this, but I really think I'll go home and paint a big “13” above the door to my bathroom. That would just be cool. Or whatever word we used back then.
When I was young, Christmas came in December, but Santa Clause didn't come until May. Our Santa Clause, whom we called The Doctors (yeah, it's a Belizean thing), was much more than the legend so many of you cling to. We could write letters and actually get pretty much anything we asked for. Of course, Mom insisted that we write at least one whole page of news and we could ask for no more than one thing each. The youngest children (see photo) couldn't write very well, so they dictated their letters to Mom. Once Carolita was trying to figure out what she could write, and Mom told her to just think of something interesting that happened lately. Carolita's face lit up, "I know, I know," she said excitedly, "tell him we got pink toilet paper." We lived exciting lives, yes, but each May, they got a little better because The Doctors came to Belize. Once I asked for knitting needles, because I was trying to learn how to knit after finding the entry in the "K" encycolopedia and attempting the craft with crochet hooks. Not only did they bring me about a dozen sets of knitting needles, but accompanied it with yarn, craft books, and every imaginable accessory. Michael once asked for a watch, and received one of those super cool calculator watches, and the rest of us all got watches too! They brought us rockets and tiny pool tables and paddle balls and just all sorts of stuff. Nothing was as exciting as The Doctors coming to town. 