I have heard that King Louis the something-or-other used to receive visitors from his bath, and it has convinced me of his wisdom. I wonder if someone was employed simply to add hot water? I imagine his bathtub sits empty and proud in a museum somewhere kept clean and gleaming by someone employed to dust it.
Things should be built to last.
My bathtub is a claw footed cast iron behemoth, a relic from a by-gone era when things were built to endure forever. It is the bathtub I used to dream about when I lived in the west and everything was new and streamlined. We found it in Missouri in a neighbor’s yard where its purpose was to hold strawberry plants. I haggled to buy it for a handful of cash and the promise to write several articles for a local newsletter. The neighbor even delivered it. It took four of us to take the tub out of the back of the truck and put it in the shed where it would wait for three years for renovation to finish, first serving as a roosting place for chickens, then as a repository for old sheets and blankets we kept to keep the animals warm during bitter winters.
Eventually I decided to use it even if the bathroom wasn’t done. My father , the foreman of my house and man of all heavy jobs, wrapped a chain around it and dragged it to the house hooked to the back of his truck. The tub was set up in the mudroom while we repaired the bathroom floor, shoring up joists and replacing wood so that it’s weight would be supported. A cast iron bathtub full of water is akin to a small dinosaur and only a floor built to bear heavy burdens could handle it.
My father became sick that winter and the bathtub stayed where it had landed next to the wash machine. On one of his better days Dad rigged it up with the hosing from a shop vac, and a garden hose, and a plastic cup stuck in the overflow hole and I finally got to sit in my bathtub, water up to my neck, cocooned in heat and smooth porcelain until the children found me and jumped in like puppies in a pond.
My father died soon after, long before the renovation we had been doing together was finished. We abandoned the house including the bathtub and moved out.
Soon we made a new friend, Ken, who had a knack for plumbing and suggested that he could help us install the old bathtub in our new place. The house had a concrete foundation that could handle its weight and the walls were still open waiting for drywall. Our friend had a torch and knew how to solder copper.
My fifteen year old daughter and I hauled that old tub out of the old house into the new, grunting and straining and bruising ourselves, irritable and overworked like the chickens that used to perch on its smooth sides scrabbling for purchase.
In only a few days it was ready, plumbed to the wall like a proper tub with facets for hot and cold instead of a garden hose. The first bath was actually given to Ken who had earned it down on his knees on the concrete, contorted at all angles making the plumbing job sound. We lit candles for him, handed him a cold beer and a fresh towel, and asked him to christen the maiden voyage.
Soon it was my turn and I filled it as far as it could go, almost to the point of spilling over (no wimpy modern overflow for me). The little children joined me, and splashed, and paddled, and giggled, and spit water in my face. We stayed in the tub until we were waterlogged, toes and fingers puckered. I would drain just a bit of water now and then and add pure hot while the kids huddled at the other end. I thought of the hired hot water pourer in the king’s court and realized now luxurious this bathtub really was.
I often lie in the tub and wonder who bathed in it long before me, mothers, children, farm laborers, family dogs. I am part of the bathtub’s legacy, its silent history made up of my father and his improvisation, my long private soaks that are so rare and revitalizing, my friend’s help, my children’s laughter, all wrapped up in a story built to last.
A bathtub like that is not about instant gratification. Even a bathtub can teach us lessons about permanence, peace, and the joys of relaxing. Right now stop what ever you are doing and go have a long soak. Or at the very least close your eyes and imagine the warm water lapping your chin, the fizz of bubbles, the sweet honey light of a glowing candles...close your eyes and breathe...
