Being a Dirty Bird

Like many people, I loved my grandparents' home. It was warm and cozy; it smelled always of comfort foods simmering on the stove, and it had lots of unique features including a pink tiled bathroom with a tub set on the diagonal. I used to marvel at the bath because its surround was a large square set beneath the window. It's construction made the space seem luxurious even though the bathroom actually was not at all large. For some reason, I used to long to take a bath in that tub; it would have been a space to dream of the house I myself would one day have. I wanted a tub like that! But, as it was, my siblings and I never took a bath that I can remember when we were at my grandparents'. I have no idea why this was; surely we smelled badly after playing all day in the summer sun! Our puppy smell must have been sweet, however, in my grandparents' nostrils, like  a gentle musk mixed in with their own since they too never used the tub.

Big Ma and Big Daddy had at that point, the 1970s, been country people for what was still a majority of their lives, they having moved from rural Mississippi in the Forties. Both of them were born at or near the turn of the century. I don't suppose in their country house they had a bathroom with a tub. I remember the red pump near the front door of their house. I took a picture there in 1974 with my father and my brother posing. Between the 1940s and the 1970s, there remained a gap for my grandparents, which is to say they did not necessarily adjust all of their practices to modern behavior belonging to the twentieth century.

How ironic it is then that their granddaughter would return to Mississippi and take up their old ways, partly out of necessity or limitations and partly out of philosophy. I have moved into a 1951 storefront with a living space in the back. There is in fact running water and a bathroom, but I've had to make both a kitchen (without a sink) and a bathroom without a tub. This arrangement is totally a choice. (Indeed, I have a full, 2000 square foot house in a northern state, complete with two and a half baths.) In the last several years, after our kids left for college and from which they have since graduated, I found myself wanting to have a pared down experience. I connect this goal to my writing process, which involves removing unnecessary things, clutter from my life and clutter from my mind. Is bathing one of those unnecessary things?

Well, honestly, when I live in a home that has a bath I do bathe every single day. Bathing has always been for me therapeutic. I'm as invested in the daily ritual of experiencing the feel of hot water on my skin as I am in getting clean. But, I also find, that when I'm living in a space that doesn't have a full bath, I quickly forget about the daily shower and adjust myself to a washup. My flexibility comes either from memory of my grandparents' seeming well-being or from a retreat I attended ten years ago that included twelve women and but one shower, whose hot water lasted for only two sessions each morning. The retreat director, a Moroccan who had grown up in Iraq, suggested in a very motherly, nurturing voice that we ladies didn't really need to shower each day. I think she was saying to us, "Be comfortable in your own skin, its oils, even its funk." That too, I have come to feel, is part of my writing process. My natural musk is part of my undisturbed vessel. As I write with my whole being, my body, unbothered for a time by the urge to stop and wash, is able to function as channel. There is undoubtedly a time for bathing but perhaps it is best matched with the rhythms of thinking and writing. This may mean developing one's best time for meeting body with water rather than unconsciously conforming to the common practice of taking a full-on shower every morning or evening.

I am loving my newfound freedom of my body's natural odors. They are as sensual as the smell released from slicing an onion or from stepping onto freshly-cut grass. I am happy in fact to be a dirty bird.