THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT

JULY 17, 2022 – Here in the Northwoods, life used to be far more primitive at our family’s summer cabin. There was no phone, and our grandmother cooked up a storm on a wood-burning stove. A hand-pump outside the cabin provided water for drinking, cooking, and washing. With a bar of soap, you bathed in the lake.

Though modern plumbing had been installed by the late 1950s, the two-seater outhouse, built like a brick . . . uh, never mind . . . was still in operation. We called it the “greenhouse,” since Grandpa had painted it to blend in with the verdant surroundings. It was sited on the wooded hillside east of the cabin, and Grandpa had built a nice walkway down from the edge of the yard. To communicate occupancy status, he’d painted two sides of a block of wood—red for “Occupied” and green for “Unoccupied”—and hung it on a tree trunk at the top of the walkway. If you wanted to use the greenhouse and it was unoccupied, you turned the block of wood to “red” and descended the walkway. On your way out, you changed “red” back to “green.”

The greenhouse was equipped with wide bench seating, and a real toilet seat covered one hole. The companion hole—for men (and boys of a minimum height) going #1—reminded me of the size and shape of a Brontosaurus egg. I was impressed that the edges of the hole hadn’t been left rough-cut but were nicely filed and sanded. The hole had a proper wooden cover with a knob in the center.

The greenhouse doubled as a storage shed for items that would’ve been long forgotten if you didn’t lay eyes on them every time you used the “facilities.” There was an ancient sack of lye and some old, rusted clubs from the 1920s and Grandpa’s apparent fling with golf. As a teenager, I used the driver to hit small rocks into the lake from the top of the bank in front of the cabin. Another item was a five-gallon pail labeled, “Lap Cement.” When I was seven or eight, one afternoon I informed Grandpa, who was chopping firewood near the top of the walkway, that I had to use the greenhouse to “go #2.” He told me to see how many words I could make out of “Lap Cement.” Ten minutes later I proudly answered “five,” whereupon, he said, “That’s a good start, but a candy bar says you can do better next time.”

Another thing in the greenhouse was an old accordion case. It was a remnant of Grandpa’s thriving music school back in the 1930s. In the Twenties, he’d been a violinist in pit orchestras for silent movie theaters in downtown Minneapolis. With the advent of “talkies,” Grandpa turned to violin teaching and teamed up with an accordion player to round up students by door-to-door soliciting. In 1939, the two music teachers experienced discord. The accordionist bought out Grandpa’s interest, giving Grandpa the means to purchase the land and build the cabin that became my grandparents’ Shangri-La. For reasons unknown to me, an empty accordion case had found its way to paradise and . . . the greenhouse.

Dang! I’d intended to write about politics today but got only as far as . . . an outhouse. Perhaps that’s all that need be said.

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© 2022 by Eric Nilsson