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most of the outhouses on the island were located. The outhouse was a two-seater; designed for parent and child, featuring hand-carved heart-shaped openings in the wooden platform on which one sat. This two-seater design was chosen in part because my grandmother, and to some extent my mother as well, were quite fearful of what might be lurking in the woods beyond the cottage, especially in the dark. This fear, which was quite unfounded and silly, was passed on to the children. It is true that we once spotted bear tracks on the island, but only once. More commonly, raccoons would get into the garbage if we left it by the cottage. They would brazenly hiss at us if we tried to shoo them away. At one time we had Afghan hounds, who were avid hunters. On one occasion they encountered a skunk, which doused one with its spray, and on another occasion, a porcupine, which left needles in its nose, but these were not good reasons to be frightened about going to the outhouse at night. Nevertheless, we had antique chamber pots in the cottage to be used at night for convenience.
The front door of the cottage opened into the living room, which was a square space 12’ x 13’, one foot wider than half the width of the cottage. In the far-left corner of the living room was a Franklin stove, with its stovepipe rising upward next to the corner cupboard that support- ed the chimney, to which it was connected by a right angled 6” metal stove pipe. The Franklin stoves we had were thin-walled, oval, steel cylinders with flat tops and bottoms resting on metal feet. A lid with a coiled wire handle covered the large opening on the top through which logs were dropped, and a round spout on the front had a louvered dial on the cover that controlled the draft. The stove rested on a metal covered wooden platform that kept it an inch off the linoleum, which covered floorboards, and was intended to keep sparks and ashes from falling onto the flammable flooring and setting the cottage on fire. We burned pine or fir logs in the stove. Because of the pine sap, the fires lit quickly, and the stove could rapidly become dangerously hot if you didn’t pay attention and reduce the air intake. On occasion the metal walls of the stove could be seen to begin to become a bluish-orange color because of the intense heat within. If the fires lit quickly, they also burned down quickly; if you wanted the cottage to stay warm overnight, you had to restock the fire every few hours. We rarely did this, in large part because we never trusted the fire to burn safely without someone watching over it. As the stoves aged, their walls developed small holes from rust or deterioration, and they had to be replaced. The old, worn-out, rusting stoves were thrown onto a hillside in the woods that overlooked the swampy part of the hotel park – the de facto island trash dump -- to rust and eventually disintegrate.
The furniture in the cottage consisted of an assort- ment of old straight-backed chairs, an old wicker rocking chair, and a couple of cane-bottomed rocking chairs, some purchased locally but most taken from my
Volume 73 • Number 4 Washtenaw County Medical Society BULLETIN 21
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