When I was a teenager, I spend a number of years living without running water, electricity, and modern plumbing.
No, really. It’s one of the reasons I’m creative, and erm… weird.
Anyway, later on, we had a water cistern (tank) on the top of our pine covered hill, where we lived. Once every week, I’d drive this old 1940′s water truck and go fill it with a hose at the odd neighbor’s house.
The neighbor was a nice fella, late 40′s, and still living at home with his parents. His name was Junion, and he didn’t “believe” in having a drivers license, and he’d talk my ear off for hours at a time, while I was a captive audience filling our water tank.
All I wanted to do was read fantasy pulp novels, or plan my Dungeons and Dragons campaign, but oh no.
Junior had all manner of livestock, and even some deadstock, including piles and piles of rotting sheep skins in the barn. They had to have been there for decades, and they were plague-like.
It was pretty rank there anyway, Junior’s pigpen often sitting with a dead bloated pig in all of the slop. But somehow, those sheep pelts maintained their very own, sweaty odor.
So, you can imaging my thrill of my weekly water chore. Too bad my friends the Trents’ or the Careys’ or the Proctors’ lived so far away.
Oh well, at least I have some lingering mental illness because of the time I spent on that farm.
- Daniel
Related posts:
THE DICKENS! (We say that all the time. Do dishes like The Dickens. Cold outside like The Dickens.)
Most of my family is epileptic so we say “like the Shakespeares”.
(way to easy to get naughty here, today… monday mind in the steam gutter)
I recall the dead pigs as being very aromatic in the heat of the summer from the top of a haystack while working hard bucking bales!!