Have you thought about your bathroom lately? No, not about the fact that it's time to clean it or you'd give your eyeteeth to own a Jacuzzi with extra jets. No, no, no. I mean have you thought about what it means to have a bathroom of your very own?
When I was a little girl my parents and I lived in a one-bedroom house with no bathroom. That's right - no bathroom. None. Zip. Nada. Fortunately my grandparents lived in the larger house built directly in front of our little cottage and they had a much-coveted indoor bathroom. Better still, they liked us and invited us to frequent their lavatory just as much as we wanted. I recall winter nights making the "last call" with my mother, trudging the 100 footsteps or so through freezing snow into the warmth of Grandpa's house. Bath time was fun because Grandma and Grandpa's claw foot tub seemed as big as a swimming pool compared to the little plastic tub my mother put into the kitchen sink to give me "sponge" baths.
Then one day at our little house I heard some hammering and sawing. I went to investigate and - Wow! A whole section of the bedroom wall was missing, which means that cars traversing down the alley could look right into our house! My dad had a workbench set up in the bedroom and he was in the process of adding a teeny little bathroom to the back of the house. Talk about luxury! Of course this made my dad a superhero until I turned 12 when kids grasp that their parents don't know a darned thing and it's nothing short of a miracle that they'd made it this far with so little in the brain department.
A few years later my brother came along and we swapped houses with my grandparents. Now we had a bigger bathroom with the grand claw foot tub and even a make-up mirror. Every day I sat on the floor in rapture, watching my mother prettify herself, dabbing on powder, rouge, a bit of mascara and a smear of bright red lipstick.
Until I was 18 and moved away from home, my family of four lived in a house with one bathroom. Surprisingly I don't recall any major rifts because of it. Everybody was properly courteous, checking with others if a long visit was anticipated. Nobody carried in large novels to ponder for hours at a time, and we all got along ok. In fact, we got along a lot better than our friends who lived in the country who had an actual outhouse. Trust me, this is not pretty. Sloshing through the snow late at night to visit a small, smelly piece of real estate gives you all the elements for a very disagreeable experience with icky memories that last a lifetime.
Then one fine day along came homes with not just one indoor bath but two whole bathrooms! This was unheard of lavishness. This was straight out of Hollywood. My friend Rosemary moved to a new home with two bathrooms when we were in 7th grade. This was extravagant stuff, folks. Granted, the whole house probably had about 1100 square feet altogether, but dang! It had two bathrooms!
Fast forward a couple of decades when my spouse and daughters and I moved to South County; our new home had three full baths; I thought I would die of happiness. But then some strange phenomena occurred. First, no matter which bathroom I visited, within nano-seconds there would come a fierce pounding on the door by little fists. I will never know the fascination found by young girl children in occupying bathroom space with their mommies, but remembering my mother's eternal patience when I was a kid gaping at her in awe while she applied her make-up, I allowed my daughters to join me whenever they wished. Happily, this was fairly short-lived since eventually puberty strikes, and girl children gravitate far away from Mom whenever humanly possible.
The other phenomenon was that I now had - egads - more bathrooms to clean! Call me crazy but bathroom cleaning is not an activity high on the list of stuff I can't get enough of. Years ago when I sold real estate I was agog at the large homes that sported as many as five or six bathrooms. "All those toilets to clean," I would mutter, shaking my head. Yes, I know there are people who clean homes for a living, but still. In a weird reversal of fate, cleaning my three bathrooms made me yearn for the days when there was just one tub, one sink, one toilet to toil over.
So what, you may wonder, possessed me to suddenly wax nostalgic about bathrooms? I mean bathrooms are quite necessary, but the most important room in the house? I'll explain: a recent turn of events has evolved into a situation where I will again be living in a home with three other people and one bathroom. Daughter number one, her hubby and baby daughter Gracie sold their small, downtown condominium in Long Beach and found a cute little house in a nice part of town. Since they now have a third bedroom and since my stay in southern California will end in June, they invited me to move in with them, leaving my downtown apartment and the building's temperamental elevator behind forever. Soon we'll be enjoying (we hope) one another's company in a cozy cottage with a big, grassy yard and, yep - one bathroom.
Nostalgia is a wonderful thing; it brings one around again and completes the circle. On the other hand, I find myself a bit apprehensive about all this. "Ummm…maybe we can work out some kind of showering schedule??" I inquired tentatively the other evening. Call me old-fashioned but I don't relish even the least little bit the thought of hearing a voice next to me in the shower saying, "Yo! Pass the soap!"
Gale Hammond Gale Hammond is a writer and freelance photographer who has lived in Morgan Hill 24 years. Reach her at GaleHammond@aol.com.
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Plastic, paper bag ban considered
