The Pleasure of Warm Water

This morning I had a shower. Doesn’t sound like a big event, does it? But it was my first shower in three and a half weeks.

An incautious stretch to reach something on a high shelf had sent me crashing to the floor when the stepstool shot out from under me. I’m very, very thankful that my injuries were not worse. But the tear when I dislocated a toe on my right foot required stitches and padded bandaging that couldn’t get wet, along with a boot to relieve the pressure while it healed. That, along with the injury to my knee on my left leg meant that there was no way I could have a shower. Believe me, if putting a plastic bag over it would have worked, I would have done it. But a having a slippery plastic bag on one foot and not being able to lift the other one to clear the edge of the tub because of the knee injury seemed like a sure setup for another fall. My only recourse was to bathe off as best I could using only a bathcloth. My children and friends have various names, some too crude to mention, for this method of ablution. I was glad I could manage that, but compared to a shower, it was unsatisfying.

For centuries people bathed from a basin or sink. For many of my younger years my family had only a tub, no shower. But once there was an option I stopped taking tub baths, favoring instead a nice warm shower. When I told a friend that I was going tent camping in a national forest on my honeymoon she warned me that this might not be my best decision. “You’re a hot shower, flush toilet girl if ever there was one,” she said. Oh, how right she was.

My daily shower had become such a given that I didn’t give it a second thought – until I had to do without one. Perhaps the longing for a shower when one was not possible made me appreciate it more today. Or perhaps it was because I have recently started reading a book on mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hahn, but the “ordinary” shower today was far from ordinary. The warm water through my hair as I rinsed away the shampoo, the soothing cascade of water over my body, the sweet fragrance of a favorite body wash, the feel of the mesh scrubbie exfoliating dead skin from my unbandaged foot – all were wonderful. Not wonderful in the usual trite way in which we have come to overuse the word, but as the word really means, full of wonder. Each part perhaps ordinary, yet exquisite, when mindfully appreciated.