She is the type of girl who thinks a daily bath is essential to survival. Never mind if it is cold water, warm water, hauled water, stream water or the lake. It hasn’t always been that way, of course. As a child, like most children, she was required to take baths – one on Wednesday before midweek church service and the other on Saturday night in preparation for Sunday services. Sometime in junior high, daily bathing became a ritual of choice. It gave continuity to her schedule and provided the confidence that results from making one’s best effort to look nice. It also caused her parents to chide her for wasting water and to expound on thrift. Nevertheless, the bathing habit remains her eccentricity. She considers water from the tap an essential. She luxuriates in hot water, whether hauled and heated on a woodstove or available via a simple turn of the faucet handle. Hot springs are an ultimate extravagance provided just for her by Mother Earth.
When Forest Bathing became the new trend and buzz word in 2016 (the idea of shinrin-yoku-a taking in of the forest atmosphere – had been around since the 80s in Japan) she took to it like a duck to water. To get out and take in the forest atmosphere, bask in the great outdoors, soak in the beauty; that too became an almost daily habit. And what a luxurious habit it is! One day a ponderosa forest, the next replete with aspen, a third day piñon-pine.
Forest bathing does not have to involve splashing about or getting wet in water, though it frequently does. The best days are those she hikes for miles and returns to a hot bath or shower. No substituting one for the other; she will have her bath and forest bathe too – every last day of her life if possible.
Her ultimate daydream includes a long hike followed by the almost delirious indulgence of a hot-springs dip surrounded by mountains and conifers. Throw in a piano by the fireside and a savory meal cooked by someone else and she will know she has died and gone to heaven. But that hasn’t happened yet. So, for the time being we’ll leave her with a daily hike and a clawfoot tub filled to the brim with Epson salts.
