This is how happy I feel in the tub!
My bath is more important than it should be… I’m sure. I look forward to my bath like others look forward to pizza night or the latest Star Wars movie. Once I had to stay in a motel room without one and, honestly, you would have thought I found bedbugs instead of a mere shower stall. I finally stepped in, but with a slight look of disdain.
Whenever the subject comes up in conversation, shower people have a certain look of disbelief. Why would a person want to soak in their own filth? Well first of all, I do not clean chimneys during the day, nor am I generating the sweat that playing basketball requires. Second of all, the relaxing benefits of a warm bath far exceed a few skin cells afloat.
I like to offer up a paragraph from my own book whenever I talk about this favorite time of day, “A hot soak slows body and brain to a crawl, winding a day of hassles down to zero. Warm water surrounds every muscle, as if Mother Nature herself was cuddling it and saying , “Relax, everything’s all right now.” I have to admit that reading this description once again takes me right back to that warm and fuzzy feeling.
There was a time when my husband’s bath (yes, we are both addicts) involved daily tub cleaning. He used to be a surveyor, often mucking into virgin fields for subdivision developers. Showers made sense then, but he’s been a convert ever since I showed him the error of his shower ways.
Bath time is such an occasion around here that I was anxious to try out something new, an inflatable solar camping light. I placed this 4”X4” bubble on the window sill to catch what sun it could in winter weather, and after two weeks it finally had a charge. A special setting lets you choose whatever color you like best: red, blue, purple, aqua, yellow, orange or green. After running through them all three or four times, I picked orange. Blue turned my skin rather deathly, red made me wish I wasn’t alone, and yellow was much too bright.
The Awesomeness of My Bath
So, I’m stretched out in my tub, the room filled with the glow of a sunset and BAM… blackout. Window sill charging in the winter doesn’t work very well it seems. Now here I am, unable to see my hand an inch from my nose. What? Wait! This is wrong! I resisted my impulse to fumble for the light switch and just laid there a moment, testing the waters. Wow, pitch black is perfect for soaking in the tub!
I have had occasion in the past to swim at night, and found that black water disorienting at first. And kind of eerie. But here I didn’t have to navigate, just had to let the warm water caress. As for washing and toweling off, turns out I CAN locate body parts without looking at them.
I laid in that tub trying to recall the old tune Dancing in the Dark. Still working on the lyrics to Bathing in the Dark.
SECRET: Try switching your bathing time to evenings instead mornings. Even if you don’t “do” baths, even a warm shower will still end your day on a relaxing note that will help you get a better night’s sleep.