hot water

Lately, I've had the incredible longing to soak myself in a very hot bubble bath. This has gone on for the past few weeks now. I suppose it has something to do with the slowly rising stress level with my approaching thesis manuscript deadline and defense. It's a fleeting desire. I feel it when I wash my cold hands after coming inside from playing with Emerson. I feel it after coming home from class at night. It's a longing that remains unfulfilled, even though I have small bottles of bubble bath and skin oils that I've collected over the years as hotel compliments or gifts from friends. It remains unfulfilled because I do not have a bathtub. My only solace is in taking a hot shower in my 3/4 bathroom.

But I never do this at night when the hot bath urge arises. I'm an economical environmentalist, and have no desire to waste water on such a luxury if I have no real need to bathe. My rent includes utilities, so money is not the issue. I've been to the real Mexico for a mission trip, the side unseen by tourists. I know what it feels like to lack clean water, a shower...day after day. It doesn't compare to the chosen depravity of a backpacking trip, where the rustic wilderness provides no cleansing water except from frigid alpine lakes or rivers.

I suppose I've conditioned myself to seek refuge in a hot bubble bath, starting back from my high school days, maybe even before that. It began as a ritual I learned from my sister.

Prepare the bath. Run the water...Hot, so steam fills the bathroom. Light a few candles. Select soothing music to play on a small boom box on the floor. Add oil and bubble solution to the running water. To conserve prescious condiments and maximize bubble output, add liquid dishwashing soup, the kind that softs on your hands if you have it. Doesn't matter really, the whole point is the bubbles. Big and fragile.

Throw in a loufa, a washcloth, maybe one of those rare blow-up bath pillows. Sometimes I would try to read while soaking in the bath, but it was too difficult to keep my fingertips dry, especially to turn the pages. My hands would crave the hot depths of the bath.

I grew up with a hottub, a luxury my parents added to our backyard deck layout when I was in elementary school. I think we had it even before a VCR, and I was one of the first kids in my group of friends to get one of those in 1985. I used to do cannonballs into the small octagon hottub when my parents weren't looking. But my dad always found out eventually. I was ignorant to realize just how much volume of water was depleted. Dad always knew the appropriate water level, saw the darkened wet wood deck around the edge of the tub. He always knew when I had been playing around.

Eventually my Dad enclosed the hottub in its own "Sun Room," as we called it. This allowed the hottub to be used year-round, no matter what the weather. I remember playing in that hottub as if it was my own small, private swimming pool. I loved to swim. And a hottub was a glorious upgrade from my green plastic 12" deep pool with the mini slide that was made to resemble the neck of a turtle. Since my siblings were so much older, I usually had the hottub to myself. My mom would sunbathe, keep only a half-eye on me when she wasn't absorbed in her current issue of "Good Housekeeping" magazine. She trusted my swimming ability. I was a confident fish. (And eventually would join the school swim team in 9th grade and be a lifeguard for 8 years throughout high school and college.)

Because of my simulated only-child status, I found interesting ways to amuse myself. In the cheap plastic pool, it was to bring our Chihuhua dog Chico in with me, for just a quick deep. But more eager to join me, were the ducklings we had one summer. (I grew up on a farm, so each spring brought a number of new hatches of chickens, geese, and ducks, depending on what was going on in 4-H that year.) I'd sit wearing my purple one-piece suit and small brown ducklings with gentle yellow feathers at their beaks would swim around me, twittering their small wings and gasping small quacks. Eventually, one or more of them would go poop. I'd be disgusted, but still scoop it out with my hands like I did the spiders and beetles and daddy long-legs.

With the hottub, I graduated to more elaborate water play, consisting of plastic baby dolls and Barbies. Somehow I acquired a 1960's model plastic yacht-like boat, which I used as a ski boat. I had some Barbie beach items--a blow-up plastic intertube, captain chairs, table with umbrella. I rigged up some yarn, or maybe it was some plastic craft rope or something like that, as a tow rope. Ken would drive the various dolls for a ride, with tight turns and fast flybys along the beach (aka, the step of the hottub). My brother, 7 years older than I, thought this was pretty creative, and so gave me a Barbie-sized parachute to launch her off the deck railing. That summer was filled with endless self-amusement.

I enjoyed bringing Chico in for a swim, his jerky doggy-paddle movements around the circle. His eyes widened, as if in fear. I would never let him tire. Later, our new young Chihuahua "Princess" took a flying leap into the hottub and promptly sunk like a stone to the bottom. My brother, who was in the tub with me at the time, immediately grabbed her by the scruff of her neck and brought her to the surface and out of the tub. She coughed up water, bubbles came out her nose. I knew I had just witnessed by first near-death experience. Princess eventually learned to swim.

I remember taking short dips in the hottub before bed, either with my Mom, sometimes both my parents. Or my mom would just let me go in by myself for a quick 15 minute soak and play time before bed. I would stay in just long enough for my fingers to prune, a sufficient indication that I had been in as long as my body needed--that was it's way of telling me it was refreshed, I had intrepreted. I would dry off, warm steam wisping off my skin. Then hustle upstairs to change into my nightgown, rinse out my suit and hang it off the showerhead. I was pleasently sleepy by then, and wouldn't need to be read a story, or at least not the entire book.

I suppose my present urge for a hot bath is to recreate that warm bedtime experience, that cozy sense of approaching sleep. But there are so many books to read, so many stories and poems to finish. And the bedside light stays on until my eyes are too heavy for more, even if the space around my feet is still chilled.