Tubbin' It

Boy, it's cold! It's this kind of weather when I endulge myself, filling the garden tub to the hilt with steamy, hot water and bath salts. I lie in it for as long as I can stand it or until the marrow of my bones warms to a natural temperature. I honestly do not like my garden tub. It's not built for comfort, regardless of what builder's tell you. The faucets are about a foot from the right hand corner, as you face the tub, and they're in the way of sitting on the edge and getting into the bath easily. I have trouble enough climbing over the wall nowadays, without an obstacle course to contend with.

We also have a walk in shower. The size is good, but it has two benches molded into the unit, so that cuts down on the floor space. I will admit that I prefer it to the upstairs bath, however, which is a normal tub and shower combination.

What I wouldn't give for my clawfoot, cast iron tub! It has a new owner, the ones who bought the old house. It's one of the two things that I really miss from that place. (The other is the wood fireplace.) When we built that house in the late 1960's, it had the usual tub-shower combo. After a few years of attempting to lie in that thing which looked somewhat like a shoe box, I told my former husband that I wished we had a deep claw-foot tub like my grandmother had. Eventually we found one, and it became a birthday gift. We paid more to have it installed than we did for the tub, but be that as it may, it was just what I wanted.

When I soaked in it, the hot water stayed hot, due to the composition of the tub. The water came up to nearly my shoulders and would completely cover all by my neck and head when I reclined against the comfort of the slanted end. Oh the joy! I must have spent a good deal of time in that place, as one of my girls wrote as one of her most vivid memories of me that I was always in the bathtub! Well, a gal has to find a release from stress somehow, does she not?

There was a day when my middle child came in as I was bathing. She was three years old, dressed in Healthtex plaid overalls, and she was holding saltines to her eye. trying to look through the little holes. She told me that she had cracks in her eye. Then, she began to break off tiny crumbs and place them into the tub. I asked what she was up to, and her answer? "I'm feeding the ducks." Now, that's one of my fond memories.... a sweet little girl, keeping Mommy company while Mom soaked in a saltine polluted bath! Ah well...

I digress. I miss that tub. Not just for my own comfort and warmth, but for ease as a Mom. It would hold two or three toddlers easily...and we would laugh our way through bathtime while we formed strange horns and hair dos on sudsy heads. We'd giggle as we recited Shel Silverstein's poem...'There's too many kids in this tub. There's too many KIDS in this TUB! I just washed a behind I'm SURE wasn't mine, there's too many kids in this TUB!"

Who else do you know who can wax poetic over a silly bathtub? And who else do you know who misses one so much that it nearly brings her to tears? In my NEXT house, whether here on earth or "over yonder", you can be sure that there will be a comfortable, cast iron bathtub that sits on claw feet!