History

This week's Writer's Post Blog Hop is hosted by Darla at "Blessed Little Creatures".  This post was written in response to her prompt.

    When I was a teenager I visited the Hermitage plantation in Nashville, Tennessee with my mom and was blown away by the pure history that surrounded me.  If you listened carefully you could almost hear the whispers of the occupants that once lived there.  It was mind boggling to realize a hundred years or so before folks were going about their business in that exact spot.  History was being made. Andrew Jackson himself walked those same paths.  He slept in that room and dined at that table.  I wonder if in a hundred years or so down the road if people will wonder about me and what made me tick, where I slept, what I ate, and how I felt about things. 

      Even though we were only minutes away from the bustling metropolis of Nashville, there in that place time had been frozen as it once was when Andrew Jackson had lived.  The slave cabins were intact and even more fascinating…quite a distant from the house stood the outhouse.  It kind of blew my mind at the time because of the way it was constructed and where.  Not only was it quite a jaunt from the main house, it accommodated three people with three holes.  Seriously it was an outhouse built for three.  Not only that, there was absolutely no privacy.  My crazy animated mind quickly conjured up these people of the past sitting side by side taking a crap…together. 

Boy, have we come a long way from those days without indoor toilets with doors and economy sized cans of Febreeze!   What I find even more astonishing is that I know, I just know those folks must have woke in the night and had to go. That was a hell of a long way to run.   I guess folks just did their business in a china commode right in their room in those days and inhaled the fumes for the rest of the night.  Or I imagine when they were done, they threw it out the window.  Watch out below for flying turds!  Maybe that is where the old story my dad used to tell of a man getting killed by a flying turd came from.  I wonder!   Boy, am I glad I live now in the land of indoor toilets, running water, and ventilation!!

       I eagerly anticipated history class in high school and thoroughly enjoyed it.  I think it is important to learn history because it is only through learning what happened in the past that we can truly understand and grasp the present and the future. Like those that came before us, we live, we learn, and proceed forward with that knowledge.