A Little Bit Like Home

Toilet(s) in the Front Yard

We moved to St. Joseph in the late 1990s, into a house built in the 1950s. The previous owner, Suzy, was only the second person to live there and had stayed for decades. She taught swimming lessons at the local Y and had a pool built in the backyard. It became the center of neighborhood life.

We arrived at the end of swimming season, so the pool was already winterized. Still, it didn’t take long to realize we had inherited more than a house. It was a place where life happened. Shortly after moving in, we met our next-door neighbors, Gary and Kathy. They had two kids the same age as two of ours, and we all hit it off immediately.

Spring came, and with it, the question every first-time pool owner hears: “So…when are you filling the pool?” Not long after, Gary came back dragging a garden hose supplying water from his house. It took several days to fill the pool, even with two hoses running, but that was the kind of neighbors they were.

That summer, many evenings ended poolside, with kids swimming and supper coming off a grill or out of a pizza box.

And like any good neighborly relationship, it eventually included practical jokes.

It was January 1999, and Gary and Kathy were remodeling a bathroom at the same time Beth and I were remodeling one in ours.

One night, as part of our usual bedtime routine, Beth shut off the front porch light and looked out the door before locking it. She paused.

“There’s something by the tree,” she said.

Sitting in our front yard was a toilet, right in the open. A handwritten cardboard sign stuck out of the bowl with a marker-written message: FOR SALE, complete with our phone number. Instantly, I had an idea.

I slipped on my house slippers, headed into the cold, snowy night and placed the toilet prominently in Gary’s front yard. Then inspiration struck.

We had a toilet from our remodel sitting near the base of our drive. It was partially frozen to the ground, but I wrestled it free and carried it over, adding it beside Gary’s. I nearly laughed myself to sleep. It was the night before my birthday, and I figured this was a pretty good gift to myself.

The next morning, just after five, I headed out for my early radio shift. As I drove past Gary and Kathy’s house, I smiled at the sight of the two toilets sitting there in the snow. With the cold temperatures and fresh snowfall, I assumed they’d be there for a while.

Feeling particularly pleased with myself, I mentioned the prank on the air, confident there was no chance Gary or Kathy were listening. A few minutes later, the board operator told me I had a phone call.

It was Gary.

He wanted to know if I was sincerely trying to sell toilets from my front yard. I corrected him, telling him the toilets were in his yard, likely frozen to the ground, and that I’d just seen them less than an hour earlier.

Then he told me the rest of the story.

Gary had woken unexpectedly around 4:30 that morning. Looking out his front window, he noticed something unusual in his yard. Two toilets. It didn’t take long for him to connect the dots. He waited. When he saw me leave home, he went outside, moved both toilets back to my yard, and added a third one from his basement, just to make sure the message landed.

When I got home after the morning show, there they were. Three toilets in our front yard, the FOR SALE sign back in place, complete with our phone number. Beth had already taken two phone calls. One person stopped by and offered to pay for one. She told him to take it. The phone rang more than a few times that day, with callers asking about the price and wishing me a happy birthday.

In the end, it all worked out. A neighbor up the street was remodeling a hunting cabin and needed a few toilets to replace the ones in the old place.

Looking back, it wasn’t really about the prank or even the laughs. It was about the kind of neighbors who show up with a garden hose and know exactly how far to take a joke. The kind of neighbor you hope for.

Tom Brand writes stories rooted in faith, family, and small-town life. He is the author of Welts on Your Butt a Calf Could Suck and I Never Heard of Johnny Fry, available at www.RichardsonPress.com. He believes good neighbors, like good stories, are worth holding on to.