On May
30, I took my first shower in 3 ½ months. (That's how long it had
been since a trip to Anchorage, waiting for the ice
to thaw enough along the lake shore to insert a lake pump).
Do you
know how difficult it is to wash long hair standing up in front of the
kitchen sink, pouring small pots of snow melt water warmed on the wood stove
over one's hair? My hair never felt clean; just dirty or
soapy, so I never looked in a mirror all winter to check out the
results. (I probably looked like the Bride of Frankenstein). Furthermore, can you imagine how LOW the motivation is to undertake this l-o-n-g and c-o-l-d process in a dark and cold cabin? From
our effortful experience, I totally understand why old timers bathed
only on Saturday nights and I absolutely pity those poor mining camp
hookers.
I figure
that my husband can have a wife who has clean hair, shaves her legs,
and wears high heels, OR he can have an unkempt wife willing
to live in the boonies with no running water all winter, but he can't
have both at the same time. So neither of us shaved for 3 ½
months. My joke was that the leg hair was so long I could have
told wind direction IF I had pulled my pants legs up, but who would
do that in an Alaskan winter when I routinely wore two layers of socks INSIDE
the cabin. When I finally did shave in that blessed shower, the drain
pan looked like some poor poodle had drowned and was circling the
drain. Did I care? Oh no! I lingered under that fantastic
invention called a shower head, appreciating that other noble device
called an on-demand heater, just daring our 55 gallon drum of shower
water to dribble to an end before I was finished.
In such
a setting, it feels downright decadent to take a shower every single
day. Dirty? Shower. Hot? Shower. Bored? Long shower. Because the
mosquitoes are at their hungriest and most aggressive in June, we
keep a smoky fire burning in the front fire pit, stunning the pesky
creatures into welcome lethargy. As a result, we smell like firemen
and scratch like a pair of primates. Guess what. Shower. I'll drain
the entire lake. It is better than penicillin for fixing what ails
me... until the lake freezes again in October.
