I hadn’t taken a bath in more than a year, never time for a bath, always something else
but when you look at the bath when you’re
buying the house, the bath
seems like such a good idea
and it was like any other bath,
I threw my arms up and my feet out
when it got too hot
and I thought the same things
and decided it was time
I let it run out
and when I did
it made a sound, a sucking
sound like so many things
drawn down too fast
through the dark
of an unseen pipe
and all that space for the bath
could be used for
something better, all that
wasted space: more room
than a seat in coach,
maybe it’s just
the idea
of that space,
a life of stretching
out we really want:
to fill some room that’s
empty, some room
inside of us.
Bill Pearse 
Ooh, no, never a bath. The water’s either so hot you turn boiled ham pink or not warm enough so you have to keep topping up the hot and our bathroom’s always freezing so the bits of you out of the water will feel cold unless it’s summer and who the hell wants a bath in summer?
Yes, a waste of space. But then so are chimneys in these days of central heating but I still think roofs look unfinished without them 🙂
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Boiled ham pink? This is nuts. I am boiling a ham right now, half a picnic shoulder they call it, smoked. On the bone. But not me in the bath, I don’t cook well. When we were with my mom in Germany I took plenty baths, because her old house was so drafty and there was that impression of being cold, even in October, that set in quick. And the bath was a good antidote to that obviously. Like the comment about chimneys, I get that. Was trying to riff off the in-and-out of space with the physical and then our expectations, the internal, trying to always fill some imagined void. Sigh.
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My mother in law loves a bath – says she doesn’t feel as clean after a shower, though baths are like skin soup to me. And I get the imagined void thing I think – it’s why our houses are so full, we fill our space with stuff and hope to fill ourselves too. Maybe 🙂
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We have some emptyish cupboards in our pantry and yes, it feels odd to leave them that way. I guess we have a thing about filling empty spaces perhaps so we feel full. Or I don’t know, because we’re anal retentive.
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I look around our house and we just have ‘stuff’ everywhere. Stuff we’ve bought, stuff people have given us and we haven’t got round to taking to a charity shop yet. Everytime birthdays and Christmas come round I tell people, please don’t buy us stuff – we don’t need it. But still they do. So we fill all our spaces up and we want to fill other people’s spaces too – what’s the psychology there? Some kind of seige mentality, where if you have enough stuff it will act as a buffer against the dangers lurking outside? Do we secretly all know a zombie apocalypse is coming and we want to ensure we have enough stuff to barricade the door against the horde? (Sorry – Halloween hangover. Watched two episodes of The Walking Dead last night) 🙂 I’ll stop ranting now
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Ours is creeping back in too, as you knew it would, have a year long hiatus and a purge. All the stuff we have in our garage still, the holding tank. Funny — it gets in the way I think, though we can’t do without it it seems. Weird.
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Problem is, we just don’t see it in the end. I’ve been walking past the same box of second hand books for about two years – don’t even register it’s there! 🙂
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And so it’s not! I know, my wife has that ability to not see things, I envy her. They follow me, the things. They talk to me, demand reckoning, acknowledgment.
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Some things talk to me – our entire spare room every time someone comes to stay and we have to clear it to get the sofa bed out … Grr
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Yeah. The bathtub. It’s up there in our master bedroom. Hasn’t been used in years. We’ve got stuff in it instead. But now that you mention it. Maybe I need a bath today.
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Candle and a lemonade, some incense, a purring cat. Iron Maiden on the tape deck, all set.
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i love taking a bath. it’s my refuge. calm, warm, quiet, peace – just float.
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I am back into bath mode. Back in bath! Wasn’t that a song by that Aussie group? You know the one. It’s been so long, I’m glad to be bath.
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See that cat? That’s me in my next life if I play my cards right.
Who wants to sit in a tub of their own filth? I never got that.
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I always take a shower before a bath, so I don’t have to sit in my own filth. JOKING. That cat was my mom’s, named Hobo, lived in Germany. Lived to about 20 we think.
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I’m pro bath. No one can bother you in the bath.
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No one. And if they do, why heck they should join you! I am going back in bath I think. “BACK IN BATH.”
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