We recently got a shed. It was free, as someone wanted to get rid of it. We all know that age-old adage that nothing in life is free. This will likely be the case once we pay for its move and the step we have to put in because it is on blocks – it’s too high for me to get inside!

My husband made jokes over the last month as we anticipated bringing it to the house about putting in a TV and a nice comfortable chair. So, imagine my nine-year-old son’s surprise, and serious disappointment, when he found out it was not to be a “man cave” with a “boy lazy” – that took us a moment – he meant a Lazy Boy! 

It won’t be a “she shed” either. It will have a place so I can pot up plants, hang and store tools, and all sorts of other items that seem to fall on my car or we trip over in the garage. I have to laugh at all these terms we have developed over the last few years however. What makes me sort of chuckle even more is the whole idea of privacy and “my space.” Imagine Maria Mitchell’s shock upon hearing all of this – “A ‘she shed’?! What might that be?” Privacy? A room of one’s own? A private space?  Ha!

Try a shared bed with your two sisters, a shared bedroom with elderly Great Aunt Hannah, a chamber pot for nighttime relief, a three-holer privy. Yes, you too could use the bathroom together in the outhouse – no partition but a good time to catch up! Spaces were not private, they were lived in. Spaces were not your own, they were shared. All space was used for living and the whole idea behind privacy and a space of one’s own did not really come about until the Industrial Revolution and the latter part of the nineteenth century when people had more money, had more time off – which still was not much – and tended to have smaller families. That gave you more space to call your own and less time for a nice chat since you may not have had a 3-holer. So appreciate your one bathroom – at least you don’t have to share the space while using the toilet!

JNLF