Corn Cobs and….

What did our ancestors use for their daily needs before all this sophisticated stuff we are using today was invented. Sometimes small insights into the primitive life force you to think how innovative the homo sapiens has been –constantly creating, inventing things to improvise every single function of life,be it eating, sleeping, washing,cooking, cleaning, just name anything that we do rhetorically ,using our modern day things and equipment – but so may things had been invented, used and obsoleted before we reached here.
I think thats enough for the epilogue.Coming to the actual story, we were on vacation to Smoky Mountains Tennesee and we came across a museum of old farmhouses dated back to the earlier centuries, frankly I did not care to read the notes provided as I hate being educated, so I don’t want to throw in any figure just for the sake of it.Its just that they were primitive houses of farmers, who were earlier generations of Adam and Eve. They were well planned houses with primitive fireplaces, wood logs for dining table etc. There were separate rooms for storing apples after the apple season I believe, this must be the time when refrigeration was not even conceived in some intelligent mind.There was a slaughter house where huge pieces of artifical meat were hanging, there were chicken houses for rearing poultry, egg houses to store eggs – full of straw to provide cushion to the eggs.I mean it was really well-planned and you could think of a reason for everything.
And there was a room tucked away out in the courtyard, a little away from the house.It was the toilet, restroom whatever you like to call it. And inside the door was a hole in the ground – that is imaginable as that was what it would have been before all the plumbing and toilet seats were invented. But what really was beyond me was that on each side of that hole were empty corn cobs with the corn all plucked out. They were what is left of the corn cob after you have eaten all the corn off it.So what were corn cobs doing in the toilet.Did people eat it while doing the thing, was it an instant laxative or something.Mr Hubby then told me that it was used as the toilet paper centuries ago.What, I don’t believe it!!But he chortled and pointed to the bundles of cobs on the left side and the right side. The ones on the left side were clean white ones and the ones on the right were soiled brown ones. My hand instantly reached my nose and I was about to run away when he said that of course its not the real thing on the dirty brown ones, its just to create the effect, to make it look real. I should have taken a picture of it but my basic problem is not doing the right thing at the right time and the right place. But that was an amazing discovery, a piece of knowledge.And subsequently at the adjacent tourist souvenir shop, they were selling packages of 2 brown and 1 white cob packaged with the incredible words -“First you use a brown one and then you use a white one to see if you need to use another brown one.”
If he reads this one, hubby will be truly disgusted and surely ask me – Have you exhausted all stories of me and our kitchen and dining life that you are diversifying into such crappy areas. But dear friends, those who honor me by reading my absurd posts, I have no intentions of expanding my imagination in this area, so please don’t be discomfited and do come back.