I love showers. Part of the reason we’ve moved to Iowa and not Colorado or New Mexico is that my water usage, ie the twenty minutes I would like to spend daily under hot water for the pure pleasure of it, is going to be much less of an environmental issue here than it would be in a more arid place.  But, our new house has no shower.  

Until we put one in, we’ll be taking baths.  Not that we didn’t take baths before, but they were always with lots of bubbles for the purpose of relaxing in the evening, not to actually get clean. And they certainly were never meant to replace my twenty minute morning shower ritual.  

I’ve learned that I dislike how the water around me becomes soapy and dirty while I sit in it.  I dislike how the air around me never steams up enough for the non-submerged parts of me to stay warm.  And how quickly the water cools.  

A space heater will solve some of this, and we’ll get one soon.  Installing a shower will be our final solution, and I can’t imagine we’ll wait too long to get around to that either.  And maybe this shower deprivation will help me rethink the kind of water-wasting (and water-heater energy sucking) showers I used to take.  

But for the moment, there is already something that makes it all better.  In our new house, when you step out shivering from your morning bath, you can run over to the heater in the kitchen, turn it on for the moment, and let its almost-burning hot air finish drying you off.  And standing naked there, next to the windows in the kitchen, look out over the fields, feeling confident there’s no one else around to look back in.