Shivering and Schvitzing

Our Sauna and Cold Plunge Tucked Into the Hillside at the Five Acre Wood

Last night we used our sauna for the first time. Twinkly lights and two small fires, music, chatter, sweating, and shivering — the five of us (Pearl, too) gathered round. Sometimes I embark down the wantsies path and worry a decision won’t be sound. The sauna and cold plunge and all that Walter built (with a little help from us) in less than a month into the hillside is a marvelous example of why taking a chance with a farfetched idea is worth it!

I had on ink-stained terra cotta pants and a pink linen tank top and added to it my new colourful robe. Silas told me I looked both like me and like a character from a picture book. This lifted my already lifted spirits and rekindled a new fire within me. Throughout the night, we balled up old documents and tossed them into the fire, which Søren suggested was suspicious. Life is so weird and wonderful, and the smallest things make it so!

My poem, an I Remember, inspired by Joe Brainard

Something Else Could Also Happen

I remember a snowy evening in New York, a bathhouse, two strange friends, borscht and beet juice — I wanted all of it and I got all of it. Then endless down, downing, into something ancient, into an arena, time travel down. There, dotting the edges, old men with hairy tufts on shoulders, hot, steamy, schvitzing. I couldn’t catch my breath and then cold, icy cold swim, and again, I couldn’t breathe. Into the hot, into the cold again, I thought I’d suffocate, I was suffocating, and it was okay. When it was over my clothes were gone, so I went out onto the balcony, into the night, beneath the falling snow and I marveled at the beauty of the world.

                                                           30 November 2023 | No. 181