By: W.C. Reader

We were on the way to San Antonio, the other day, and Mama Doris was handling the reins to our vehicle. That gave us plenty of time to survey the countryside and see if anything had changed in recent months and years. The thing that hit our eyes most during our inspection tour is the number of new houses that are springing up on the farms, especially in the areas between Panna Maria and Floresville. Now the styles chosen for most of these homes were quite attractive, they were of sturdy construction, and they appeared to be quite roomy. Even so, these expensive dwellings seemed to present a bleak appearance on the landscape. It was obvious that there were no large trees, but time would take care of that. The answer continued to elude us as we were driving home later in the day and had a second chance to inspect these modern homes.

Now unanswered questions like this have a way of bothering us, so we decided to go out into the country and make further inspections. We asked Mama to crank up the car and drive us along some of the old dirt roads, which once were rutted, by buggies and wagon wheels. Along these trails we discovered several of those old country houses, which still were standing, although they were in various states of disintegration. Long ago, the land around these old dwellings had surrendered their status as cotton farms and most of the present-day owners had turned to grazing cattle on the soil.

We stopped to look at one of these where the remains of an old house was standing. You know the type with two rooms, two shed rooms, a front porch, and rust tin roof. Letting our eyes sweep the grounds and using our imagination, we saw a barn with stalls for the animals, a chicken house, the smoke house, the pig pen, the haystack pole, and way out there on the edge of an abandoned weed-covered trail, the outhouse.

The outhouse! That was it! At none of those new, expensive houses we mentioned above did we see an outhouse. Now we knew why the surroundings gave such bleak, dreary, appearance.

Mama and we own a farm out East of Yorktown, and we dismantled the house that stood on it several years ago. The only structure that remains standing on the site - at our orders - is the outhouse. It still is standing there in all its majesty, along side a vine-covered, rusty old barbed-wire fence.

Along with Mama, we drove out to this farm several years ago, accompanied by our daughter, her husband and our twin granddaughters. Getting out, we let our hand sweep across the landscape, and said, "Someday, all of this is going to be yours. And just to help you along, when you start building your house, we have left the outhouse standing intact. Have a happy life.

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