Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, September 28, 1995 TAG: 9509290021
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETH MACY
DATELINE: CATTAIL HOLLOW LENGTH: Medium
You are in southern Roanoke County. You are, astonishingly, just four miles from Tanglewood Mall.
You are standing there, flanked by mountain ridges, facing a three-room log cabin built with hand-hewn chestnut logs by freed slaves - in 1865.
Were it not for the 1988 station wagon out front, you think, the setting here could be Roanoke County, circa 1865.
Inside, you notice the way the living-room floor slopes down in the middle, then back up.
``Perfect for marbles,'' says Markhoff, 38.
She is full of jokes about her less-than-lavish lifestyle.
The single, working mother of two has ``done the food-stamp thing.''
The clothes dryer on the porch is ``my Beverly Hillbillies decor.''
Her neighbors complain because they don't have cable TV this far back in the sticks. Markhoff complains because she doesn't have a toilet.
She trudges the familiar path to her outhouse - past the spot where a copperhead was spotted days before, past the tin-roof remains of the cabin's original outdoor throne.
``This is T-1100 siding,'' she says, proudly knocking the thick walls of her outhouse. ``It'll be here forever.''
She gives you a tour of its unexpected niceties: the stained-glass cover of the moon-shaped window, the brass Moroccan tea service, the framed cover of Yankee magazine with the old man and woman gardening.
She talks about honoring ``the old ways,'' and her respect for the simpler lifestyle of yesteryear.
``The kids and I are so crowded in the cabin because we have so many more things than the old people had,'' she says. ``Probably 13 people lived here at one time - but they all owned one pair of pants.''
She looks back nostalgically on her 11-year affair with the outhouse.
She remembers easily potty-training her kids, now 3 and 5, using a potty chair in the house - ``just like everybody else.'' She recalls fondly the special 5-gallon bucket reserved for the showers she took on her front-porch steps.
She brags about the ingenious wiring that connected an indoor switch with her outhouse - and the simple flip it took to activate the lights and heater on those cold winter nights. By the time she'd walk the 30 paces, the outhouse would already be warm.
And now, after 11 years of carting her toilet paper into the wild, Markhoff is about to take her first ceremonial flush.
Inside. On a ceramic toilet from Lowe's.
She is, pun intended, quite ready to go.
Pending a few plumbing connections, her new inside toilet should be fully flushable in a week or less.
``I like to say that all this has built character,'' says Markhoff, manager of the Roanoke Natural Foods Co-op.
``But now that I have the character, I want the bathroom.''
Her mother will be even more thrilled, she says. ``She lives in a pink high-rise in Palm Beach County. She comes for about 45 minutes and then she has to leave.''
And while Markhoff may joke about the outhouse and her fear of mice and even about being poor, she's quite serious about the importance of living a simple life.
She compares her own upbringing in a Penn Forest subdivision - in a house with three bathrooms - to her children's. ``I've come to appreciate how normal and good my parents were. But I also want to give my kids something I didn't get: being close to the land and not caring what tennis shoes they go to school in.
``I think poverty is an attitude,'' she adds. ``It has to do with your vision of life, I think, whether you have dreams and hopes.
``God knows I'll always be poor, but I'm not impoverished.''
Beth Macy's column runs in Tuesday and Thursday Extra. She can be reached at 981-3435.
by CNB