79: Simple Pleasures
- Listening to the rain come down really, really hard.
- Drinking a cold pepsi after not having any pepsi for like a week.
- The first breath of air conditioning after spending more than three days straight in a tent.
- The smell of the first barbecue of the season.
- Falling asleep in the glow of a Christmas tree.
- Making silly faces at a very small child.
- Stroking really expensive yarn.
- Cuddling my hot water bottle.
- Skipping class to go to Barnes and Noble
- Handwriting a letter to someone.
- Playing new games. Teaching old games to new people.
- Superhot baths.
- Watching a movie I’ve seen a thousand times and still crying about it.
- Making Libby’s Corned Beef Hash and eating it– calories and cholesterol be damned!
- Finishing. A project, an assignment, a book, a movie.
I am as in love with my hot water bottle as I am with my couch. Where my couch has provided me with moral support in the aftermath of multiple illnesses and surgeries, depressions, and months without my husband, my hot water bottle is another constant source of pleasure and warmth. My first hot water bottle was purchased for me by my husband when we still lived in England, shortly after our daughter’s birth. It was standard sized and had a plush cover which looked like a stuffed fox. I would cuddle and hug the damned thing through migraine headaches and uterine cramps, and just snuggle it for warmth in the winter.
As the years went by, Hot Foxie began to show signs of wear and tear, and was ultimately replaced last year by Hot Sheepie, a smaller and more portable version of the same. Hot Sheepie is the perfect size for tucking under my hoddie for morning drives to freezing cold bus stops, stuffing into the small of my back on the couch at the end of a long day, and laying atop my head for headache relief.
Going through the motions of filling my hot water bottle with hot, hotter, hottest water, covering it in its lovely plush shell, and then snuggling down with it remains one of the best parts of negating pain (aside from the actual negation and or the wonderful cottony feeling that the really good drugs can offer). But it is the ceremony and machinations around the hot water bottle I like the best; having my husband put the kettle on for the water to heat, having him refill it in the morning without asking, or tucking a hot duckie in bed aside my daughter as she sleeps, recovering from a cold.