The Hole On The Wall

By kiki

Circa 1948, a friend, Richard, a.k.a. Lunga, had a cousin who moved in with his family when she was 18 or so. So my buddies and I were around 11/12 years old, still at the age of some kind of innocence.

The houses in Simons were no more than wooden shacks lacking indoor plumbing. When nature called, the inhabitants would use outhouses and wooden huts for bathing.

Lunga’s bathing hut had a hole in one wall. When the cousin was going to bathe, Lunga would go around telling all of us guys: “she bathing! she bathing!” we guys would get our pennies, nickels, and dimes together, and we would then be queued in front of the wall with Lunga standing by the hole, and he would take our money, the more we paid him, the longer we could watch the cousin bathe. The next day we were looking for bottles to take to the store for refunds for the next bath. Don’t know how many here are old enough to remember when you could take bottles to the store and get refunds.