FRESH & CLEAN
Prompt - Fresh & Clean : Write about how you feel after you take a shower
I'm old enough to remember having one bath a week, on a Sunday evening, and the rest of the week it was just a quick wash in the sink. Perfectly normal in the days before central heating. Showers? What were they? The only places you'd encounter them was at the swimming baths, or on holiday in mainland Europe, where they were much more commonplace. A daily shower, as I tend to have now, only came into my life in my thirties. Even then it was a rubbishy rubber hose attachment thingy, that sprayed water everywhere and didn't last overlong.
Fast forward a couple of decades and the idea of a home without a shower - in it's own cubicle, not over the bath - has become hard to imagine. A bath nowadays is, for me, a rarity, usually following a very long walk and meeting a need to relax my leg muscles. A bath takes time - perhap because it's so rare I treat it as a luxury, having a good soak with book in hand. A shower is a five minutes affair, or can be. There are attractions in a longer shower too.
How do I feel after I've showered? There are a lot of variables at play in reaching any conclusions. The regular daily shower, at home, is as much a habit as anything else, slotting into a morning routine that doesn't vary greatly. Get up, make the drinks, return to bed, drink drink and catch up with the world, go down to prepare the fresh fruit for breakfast, come back up to do some stretches and maybe exercise, have a shower, dress and eat. The shower has it's due place, after doing some exercise. Which might have got me a bit sweaty, especially if it involved a trip to the gym.
In the shower I seem to have speeded up in recent times. Lockdown taught me that I don't need to soap every part of my body, every single day. So the washing might just concentrate on the most important (sweaty!) areas, or it might extend to all over, including washing my hair (the daily hair wash was also a pre-covid element of the routine). It could extend to a long stand under the flow of water, something more likely if I have some back pain and the hot water hitting it feels beneficial. It might include, should include, a short period of standing on each leg, for about thirty seconds each side, to help maintain my sense of balance and some strength in my legs and hips. The shower might seem a strange place to do this, given that the surface my bare feet on is naturally slippy, but I like that I have four 'walls' close around me, meaning if I start to tilt it's easy to use a hand to redress the situation (not that I need to).
I come out of the shower feeling ready for the next stage of the day. One stage nearer to being ready to face the world. Cleansed of the sweatiness of the night, of the exertions I might have put in since getting up. I might be in a rush, but that's rare nowadays, with so few appointments in my calendar and no incentive to hurry anywhere, so usually I can take my time getting dried, applying some cream and hair gel, a bit of deodorant and after shave. If I've trimmed my beard before showering, something that happens roughly once a week, I'll have an even cleaner feel, a sleekness I don't get at other times. I am at my best (probably the best I'll be all day, all week maybe!) and thinking about what to wear, what the weather is, what I have planned for my day ahead.
Of course these feelings aren't exactly the same if the shower is happening on holiday, perhaps after a swim, possibly outdoors. A different kind of feeling. A holiday feeling. But that seems oh so long ago...
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