Hot Tubs

HOT TUBS

My father often told me that he thought the highlight of my life was when I was in the womb.  “What a shame, life peaked for you at birth”, he would laughingly say.  He thought that because I loved to soak in warm water and drink beer.  “Yup, life was great for you back then.  All you had to do was sleep in warm water and drink.  Just like now.”

Of course he was making fun of me because, in his mind, I had wasted my money on a hot tub. “What?  The bathtub isn’t good enough anymore? Now you have to have jets to swirl the water around for you.”

That was in 1991. I purchased a hot tub at a time when I was renting a house in Stroudsburg. And because I lived in town with no backyard, I really had no other voice but to put the tub in my kitchen, where most people would put their table. Yes, it was a little different but it worked beautifully for me.

When I moved to Springfield, almost ten years later, I left the tub behind, thinking it would be too costly to move. So my friends scooped it up and I spent a few more years soaking in that beautiful piece of water whenever I returned to visit.

In November 2001, I decided to get another hot tub.  So it was ordered and soon to be delivered when I showed my friend Jaye, the site of my new beloved hot tub.  It was to be placed on the side of my house, which sat on a very busy street.

“Bridget,” Jaye sternly tells me, “you are getting a privacy wall up here so no one can see you, right?”

“Naw, I don’t think it is necessary.  This is a very busy road, no one will see me getting in and out of the tub”.

“Oh, NO!! We have just suffered through 9/11.  Our country has suffered enough. No one wants to see you naked.  You WILL be getting a privacy wall,” she said in a tone that let no room for argument.

So I do and I enjoy this hot tub, through the snow and the rain and the sleet and the summer heat for ten wonderful years. But when it was time to finally move from Springfield, I didn’t bring the tub with me.  I thought it was too old and I didn’t want to invest the money to move it and put up a new privacy fence. So I gave it to my electrician.  He thought he got a great deal and I was released of the burden of worrying about how I was going to move it.  I was finished with my world of hot tubs. Or so I thought.

Two years in to living in my new home, I am cold on a wintery night and I just can’t get warm.  I am miserable and talk myself into believing that the only think to remedy this dreadful situation was to buy a new hot tub, no matter the cost, effort or impracticality.  So I searched the Internet and found another small tub to fit my craving.

When I went to the spa store, the manager talked me into buying a bigger tub.  I stood firm that I wanted a small tub but he won and I left with a 4/5-person tub.  I had a privacy wall put up and after paying the electrician $1300, I was up and running and back in the business of floating idly for hours and hours in my backyard in my artificial womb.