This morning I want only to curl up on the couch next to the dog and close my eyes and sleep. But then I receive a text from my walking and writing companion, asking if I am ready to begin. She knows that on Tuesdays, I walk to the Writing Habit, a weekly gathering with a few other writers where we...well...we write. We don't critique our work or do writing prompts. We bring our laptops and notebooks and we find a spot and we write for two hours.
To the text message I respond, I feel tired today.
Then I send another text to my writing group, repeating that I am tired and ask if anyone else is planning to come today, the implication being that if they stay home, I can too.
Someone respond quickly.
"I'm coming! The kids are back in school!"
And so, I drag my ass up off the couch, leave the dog sleeping soundly and head upstairs to shower and dress.
I don't shower every day, less frequently since spending the summer in Michigan. The water pump at the cottage does not allow for excessive water usage. I am always trying to find ways to conserve water, which is kind of funny when you look out my window and see a beautiful blue lake.
When I cook, I start by bringing the water to a boil while cooking seven or eight eggs, which go in the fridge for lunches. Then I cook broccolli or green beans, next some ears of corn and finally, the rice. All these things go in to the fridge to be used at another time. If I am not cooking rice, maybe I am ending with potatoes that day, I cool the pan of broth and use it water the basil growing in boxes on the front porch or the hanging basket of morning glories.*
We encourage sailor showers, where one rinses off, shuts off the water, soaps up, then turns the water back on to quickly rinse again. One of the kids, who shall remain nameless, asked if he could shower with a "friend," to save water. While he made a convincing argument, we did too: there was a good chance that shower could take longer than the ones they would take separately.
By July, the lake is warm enough that we stop showering altogether (as opposed to all together).
We bathed instead in the lake. We carried our biodegradeable soap and shampoo out to the end of the dock. The girls jumped in right away. 13 even took to shaving with the lathery soap we bought from a local alpaca farm, the soap encased in a felted wool cover that exfoliated the skin as well. We would lather up our hair too, pile it on top of our heads and swim around. We gave ourselves mermaid names. My favorite part was after scrubbing clean and stacking the soap and things on the dock, we waded out to the deeper water. I have never been partial to diving, but here, I would lift my arms over my head, hands outstretched to part the surface and dive down into the cool lake water. This bathing left me feeling cleaner than I have ever felt in my life. No bath in a porcelain tub has ever left me feeling like that, no shower of water from overhead either.
I remember a scene in the novel where Dolly, Anna Karenina's sister-in-law, has been banished to the country with the children. Anna's brother, Stepan Arkadyevitch, arranges this as a way to save money. He finds it less expensive to raise a family in the country. Their cow provides milk; chickens give eggs. On Sundays after church, Dolly takes the children to bathe in the creek. The children splash around, playing and cooling off until the governess makes sure they are scrubbed and polished. Dolly admits to herself that bathing with her children is one of her most pleasant activities. I remember well the feel of a child's slippery naked legs clasped around me.
A group of local peasant women join them at the river, and at first Dolly is self-conscious. As the two groups of women begin to strike up a conversation, they talk of children and breastfeeding. Dolly, whose youngest child is still an infant, is surprised to hear that the peasant women nurse their children for two or three years. The whole time they are talking, Darya and her children are half-dressed; the peasants in their good Sunday clothes. The scene remains, five hundred pages into the novel, my favorite moment of the story. The intimacy of the moment comes not from their nakedness, though it does provide a backdrop that suggests we humans are not all that different from each other. Tolstoy could have written Dolly ashamed, made her run away in the bushes to dress and whisk her children away. But he doesn't do that. He imagines instead, an opportunity for the women to come together on equal ground and find the other women more pleasant and engaging than they expect and probably than they had been taught. Dolly finds herself not wanting to leave the women's company.
This morning, standing in the shower, I pick up a bar of lavender-scented soap and rub it over the washcloth spread across my hand. I watch as the outline of my hand emerges in white lather set against green cotton. I spread out my fingers to make the shape more distinct. I could, in theory, stand here letting the hot water run, but I don't. My experience of water is different now. It has changed me, and I can't change it back, even if the lake is hundreds of miles away.
*I discovered this idea in An Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler.
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