I’m thinking about toilets this afternoon. Yes, I am feeling just fine, thank you – don’t be crude. I mean I am thinking about toilets, not thinking about using one. I think toilets might be unsung heroes and the porcelain joy of our lives.

Toilets are there for us. They are always in the same place in the dark night. Toilets are a cool and strong comfort during vile, feverish retching. With their lids down they are nice perch for filing nails, watching kids splash in the tub, resting towels on during dog baths. With one simple push of a lever or a button, everything that is distasteful just disappears. Even when not in use, toilets are witness to privacies of every individual in a household – including guests.

Toilets greet us, all clean and ours, when we come home. Have you never been happy to be back at your own toilet after some kind of sickening ex-household experience? I mourn the absence of my own toilet when living in the outer wilds. I pine for my own toilet while sharing one with a dozen other people in a field research apartment. Faced with unspeakable highway toilet horrors, I have speculated that when we do develop a molecular transporter, we’ll all use it to get home to our own toilets.

Three days ago the WideEyedSpouse and I were cruising the country byways on the way to archery class. There, on the side of the road, an abandoned toilet. “Free,” it said.

We stopped to laugh and take a picture. A few hours later the Spouse noticed the fine print on the Free sign: “to a family who will love me.”

I just felt bad. Poor old toilet. It probably served well for years, keeping secrets, holding steady, only to be tossed on the side of the road for the sake of a fashionable bathroom. Years of use left. Poor old toilet.

But I mean, ew.