On North Wilkesboro’s Sparta Road (a road coming in at close second to the Old Concord Road in my life’s “road memories”) sat grandfather and grandmother Williams’ home. Right next to that home was their water well, and across from it, on the other side, their outbuilding.

That’s outbuilding, not outhouse, but there was one of those too. I could try to write about it sometime, but I’m afraid it would be hard to get enough out of it (although “much” was put in) to fill a newspaper column.

The wood of the old building must have been, at one time, a blond color, but just as the hair, it had aged to gray.

Of course, its timbers weren’t so old as to be petrified; but its “ancientness” reminded me of wood’s excellent candidacy for such preservation.

Upon entering the outbuilding, a person’s day vision was quickly lost. It gradually returned by way slits of sunlight entering through slit-like gaps between the timbers of its walls. That light was reflected from “spheres” on the floor covered with a white powder (the reflectivity of which seemed to generate an “indoor night vision”). Just now, I’m reminded of the weird fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft’s penchant for closing himself within his aunt’s attic, with blinds drawn, effecting an artificial night, in which he felt he did his best writing).

Those white “spheres” on the outbuilding’s floor were potatoes, sprinkled with lime for their preservation until eating time.

Lime gave them a look of snowballs, and I just now remember the snow forts we built in Steve Ritchie’s yard in the early 1960s back on the Old Concord Road. The “snowy” potatoes remind me of our stockpiled “ammunition” behind our frozen forts’ walls.

I’m glad we didn’t use potatoes for our snowball fights, but one neighborhood kid did put rocks in the middle of his snowballs (I will never reveal his identity, for he grew up to become one of the nicest persons one could hope to meet).

Back to the outbuilding (gosh, that sounds ominous!).

Inside the shadowy outbuilding, their decay halted by salt, the most delectable portions of the former “denizens of the hog lot” could be seen hanging, “aging in death,” to become a highlight of breakfast. Alongside were propped up farm implements.

The earthen floor gave off a smell of soil and potatoes (a decidedly better smell than that given off by my former “Mr. Potato Heads” decomposing in our pantry back home, when real potatoes were used for the “sticking” of the eyes, eyebrows, ears, mouths, noses, and moustaches).

On the outside, the old building’s four corners rested upon “columnar foundations” (plowed up fieldstones stacked on top of each other). Just by the look of it, their piling seemed to mimic the Appalachian Mountains’ natural stacking of stone revealed in U.S. Route 421’s road cuts on toward Boone.

The outbuilding and house have been gone now for many years, the well too (though down below, I’m sure the groundwater still flows).

For a musical approximation of my sentiments about everything on that site, Google: “The Old House-John McCormack-You Tube.” But my case is even sadder than that of the song, since nothing remains.

It might be said that my grandparents’ old outbuilding is even more “out” now than it was back then, but even so, it remains “within” my memory and heart.