Chapter Seventeen

 

EXCREMENTALLY

 

Manure for Sure, Household Chores, "Merde," "What Goes Around---"

 

 

          After my Army tour in Korea I was stationed in Yokohama, Japan with my young family for three years.  It was there we first encountered "binjos" and "honey wagons" and the local practice of collecting human waste from individual homes and transporting it to the fields for use as fertilizer.

 

               In those years our familiarity with the practice made us more aware of our different cultures and conventions concerning waste, since we tended to avoid references to excrement, animal or human, as in bad taste and invented euphemisms when necessary to do so.

 

               Yet, at the times of which I write, animal waste was ever present on the farm and a part of our daily workload.  Our contacts with manure were not casual.  Daily farm tasks and close contacts with the animals, plus our youthful disregard for the consequences, meant that our boots and shoes, and sometimes socks and overalls, were redolent with the familiar odor of natural fertilizer.

 

               By maternal direction when we were little our boots and shoes would be dropped in the woodshed and our overalls -- if contaminated -- in the summer kitchen and we would head to the kitchen sink to wash the grime from our hands with the familiar yellow soap.

 

               On Saturday nights in preparation for Sunday church we were immersed in a washtub placed in front of the kitchen stove and scrubbed and shampooed in preparation for slipping into our blue serge suits and attending Mass.  The boys of other mothers might -- and sometimes did -- attend church smelling of cow and horse manure but we would walk down the aisle in a row, confident in our deodorization.

 

               We had two cowbarns and at the ends of both there were manure piles which were augmented almost daily, especially in the colder months when the cows spent the greater part of their time in the barns.  It was serious man and boy work to remove and transport the manure from the trenches behind the cows to the manure pile, the manure spreader and eventually to the fields and crops where, ironically, food for cows would grow and restart the cycle.    There was a pile also beside the horse barn.     Chicken excrement was periodically cleaned from roosts and floors of the hen houses and required disposal also.

 

               I don't recall removing any dung from the pig sty and am unaware whether that was from custom  -- preferring rather to move the sty -- or a fault of my memory.  I could ask my brother Richard but would be afraid of his answer.

 

               During our time on the farm we had no conventional running water (other than the hand pump in the kitchen sink that served all purposes) and no modern baths or toilets.  Our toilet --outhouse -- was reached by a walk through the summer kitchen, the woodshed and the "carriage house."  It had a curtain for privacy and three toilet seats, one reduced in size for juvenile bottoms.

 

               As in Japan, when our outhouse was emptied, its contents were moved to the manure pile behind the barn and eventually spread in the fields with the manure.

 

               In Chapter Thirteen I confessed that as the smallest of three boys I often helped Mom with chores around the house.  One of these was emptying chamber pots and disposing of their contents.  As unhygienic and distasteful as the practice now seems, consider the alternative: rising in a sub-zero night in unheated bedrooms and walking in a nightshirt downstairs, through the house, the kitchens, the woodshed, to a wooden seat covered with hoarfrost, while icy winds blow up and across exposed areas of your body.  Under those circumstances -- haste over taste.

 

               Among all the words used around the farm to express the natural act, including Gramp's "Merde," there was one I learned when very young and under trying circumstances.  I had run a high fever and Mom called the doctor who felt my forehead, took my temperature, put his hands on my abdomen and asked Mom if I'd had a bowel movement.  I was instantly alarmed.  I had a bowel?  So where was it?  And what makes it move?  And why doesn't mine?     Of course, with the treatment he prescribed, it did.  Had he used Gramp's word, I would have undoubtedly known. 

 

               Among the many familiar expressions that seem more often than not to hit home is "what goes around comes around."  You never completely get away.

 

               After high school and college I was in the war and upon return enrolled at Columbia University to get my masters degree.  I then taught school in New Jersey for several years and my trips back to Vermont were infrequent.      On one such trip to visit my parents and relatives I went to see an old college friend, an "Aggie," who had a dairy farm not far away.  On returning to my parents home I was pleased to see there my old high school chum and family friend, Kathleen Brooks, whom we called Katie.  I recounted how on going to the pasture to see the cows I had inadvertently stepped into a fresh pile of cow--ahh--feces.  For a second there was silence.  I knew I was in trouble.    Katie roared, "Will you listen to him!  He shoveled it all the way through high school and now he's been away to New York City and he can't say shit!"    It came around.

 

 

 

         An item of historical trivia regarding this subject: When dried in the sun, that which the cow leaves in the field can be thrown as a discus or used as a missile against an errant brother.