Bathing

We learned to shower off grid, but yesterday after years of successfully washing ourselves under a bucket with a faucet suspended over our heads the contraption broke. The handle cracked in two.

The water laden bucket slammed into the galvanized tub denting the white plastic, deforming it as if it were liquid for a moment. We won’t repair it, I said to myself. Soon we will be ready to move into our newly built house and take a bath and our clawfoot tub.

Today I took apart the shower. I decommissioned it. The hula hoop on which the curtain was hung would go back to being a hula hoop. I went out side and standing in the snow gave it a few whirls around my hips. But it was with some reluctance that I went through with the shower decommissioning.

It felt like a sentimental letting go, a kind of death almost. I thought to myself a shower is not eternal: it has to go, it’s no longer useful, I have to move on. But there’s something so beautiful and holy about washing the body that it feels as if it should be eternal.

The ritual of washing the body should go to heaven. And water is not completely for filled without human bodies to wash over, to renew, to purify, to please, to forgive, to love, to give life to. And the body too then, with dust, water, breath… As it was in the beginning.