Al Batt’s columns appear every Wednesday and Sunday.

Our farm was two hours from Minneapolis — by telephone.

I grew up with an outhouse.

Please, no applause.

The outhouse was older than me. Some outhouses had three holes. Apparently, people who were starved for entertainment crowded into them. It was a game of thrones.

The outhouse was OK. It was a place you couldn’t run with scissors. Reading was done in the outhouse. I called it the Batt Library.

The introductory speech, narrated by William Shatner at the beginning of an original “Star Trek” TV episode, was, “Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.”

“To boldly go” may be the most famous split infinitive.

I’d boldly go to our outhouse in January. It wasn’t a pleasant place to be in January. It was a spot where a young man got the feeling that he couldn’t play himself in a movie about his own life.

That said, an outhouse engages a person. William Morris wrote, “The true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.”

One year, a skunk got into the outhouse. That got my genuine interest. You don’t call a plumber about a skunk in an outhouse. You don’t use a plunger. A friend rents out his goats to eat buckthorn and other unwanted plants, but goats don’t rid outhouses of skunks. I wanted to go as a skunk in an outhouse for Halloween. My mother nixed that idea.

An outhouse was a place where fathers said things such as, “If I were the last man on earth, somebody would have used all of the toilet paper!”

A man told me that his mother used peach paper in the outhouse. Many people did. It was the Holy Grail of toilet paper. His mother went a step further. She ironed the peach paper and saved it for when they had company.

During the years (about 567,646,918 seconds) that I was a frequent guest to that outhouse, we didn’t have rain events. We had rains. Some were heavy, some weren’t. Our old farmhouse sat at the top of a hill, so water in the basement wasn’t a big problem. Our basement was finished. A finished basement has sheetrock which is mudded, taped and painted. It has floor covering, molding, doors and windows. Our basement had a small window, but it was finished. Nothing more was going to be done with that basement. That’s a finished basement.

I recall a torrential downpour that caused water to sneak into the lowest level of our home. The house cat got busy. It caught the basement’s resident mice, carried them upstairs and dropped them onto dry floor. Those mice were steaks in the meat market of that tomcat’s heart. He saved the lives of any mouse that hadn’t taken swimming lessons.

The Carpenters sang, “Rainy days and Mondays always get me down.” That was Karen and Richard Carpenter, not the carpenters I’m related to like Neal, Duane and Trever. Those three are like me, unable to carry a tune in a five-gallon pail.

When rain fell hard, the outhouse was a port in a storm, a fixed umbrella. It was better than being in the implement shed with its metal roof, which sounded like school for beginning drummers. Rain falling on and dripping from the mossy, shingled roof of the outhouse was comforting.

There is always rain in the long-range forecast if it’s long-range enough. Fortune cookies are fond of saying, “Into each life, some rain must fall.”

Rain fell recently. Then too much rain fell. I heard a woman plead and moan in the midst of the deluge, “Give me strength.”

We got a 10-day forecast’s worth of weather in 24 hours. Walking in the rain while thinking about umbrellas leaves people feeling like two cents waiting for change.

I hear people say “right as rain” when indicating that everything is in good order or they are in good health. One gentleman told me that he was as right as two rains.

  Too much rain isn’t right. Floods are ornery. Even perfect weather isn’t perfect for everyone.

  There is perfection in imperfection. I’m told that there is always an imperfection deliberately woven into a Navajo rug. It’s called a spirit line because that’s where the spirit moves in and out of the rug.

  Neither rainy days nor Mondays get me down.

  They are spirit lines.