The rug man had done such a beautiful job,
He had stretched it so smooth and so tight.
She stood and admired our new bathroom floor,
She just thought it a most wonderful sight.

The rug salesman had come and had talked to my wife,
I knew it would cost me some money.
I see nothing wrong with cold wooden floors
But you know how some women are funny.

I never did cotton to modern contraptions
Or to people just putting on airs
But my woman must keep up with the Jones’s
And the Jones’s had a carpet in theirs.

Well a man has problems with that kind of pretty
But nothing is stopping my spouse.
And now that she likes the carpet so much,
She wants to run it on into the house.

In my wood shop I like to make little weathered wooden replicas of outhouses, as we refer to them in this part of the country. The dictionary calls them “privies”. Country people always joked about getting them carpeted because the wooden floors were so cold during winter visits.

Of course a real man would never complain. The Privy is a little story about this particular bit of country humor. You may be too young to have ever experienced using a privy but I attended the eighth grade at a little country school where the boys had a two-holer and the girls had a much more modern three-holer. A favorite target for mischief, neither one ever survived a Halloween in an upright position.