A Pig In a Poke

                        A Pig In a Poke 

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            We didn’t exactly buy it sight unseen. Well, I suppose I did. My half. Unseen.

            Last winter Jim, a neighbor here on the rancho, and I began hankering (that word generally precedes a pig in a poke) after a hot tub for pain therapy. We agreed that if we found what we wanted, we’d share the cost, share the use.

We made two dread trips into Guadalajara only to find them outrageously expensive. Searches on such sites as craigslist: Mexico, for a second-hand tub yielded no results.

            Jim returned to Missouri in March. “I’ll look around here. If I find one and we agree, I’ll buy it and bring it down in my pickup.”

            He searched in his area. Checked out a couple. I nixed one. Another we agreed was too expensive. Our criteria; almost free.

            “There’s one in St. Louis. It’s old, like us. The owner wants $500.00. I’ll go check it out when I go up to see Mom.”

            Later, “He’s dismantled it. I won’t be able to see if it works or not. He’s firm on the price. Are you willing to risk your $250.00? It’s old . . . “

            “Like us. You said, already. I’ve spent $250.00 foolishly uncounted times, so I’m willing to risk.”

            A week later my therapy tub rolled in atop Jim’s pickup bed. It’s old. The tub, not the truck.

            A week after arrival, Jim had the electrical line routed from the box on opposite side of my house (of course) around to where the tub sits. Jim is meticulous. He spent hours staring at the innards. From my own experience, I know this to be one way to figure out how things go together.

            Meanwhile, I had my hands full rearranging and creating new garden areas for the flowers which the hot tub displaced.  

            The heating element isn’t working. A post is corroded, completely gone. But we can get a replacement.

An O-ring is broken. We can’t find one in town. I shudder to think of an hour and a half drive to the Big City for a thin circle of rubber that costs pennies. Not that we know where to find one. But, we’ll do what we must. We cannot fill the tub and check the pump, circulating lines and other mechanical parts without that particular O-ring.

            Me, I’m happily painting the skirt. I love Mexico for Mexico’s love of color. I’m transforming boring brown wood into a landscape of turquoise, ochre and aqua: water, earth and sky.

            Today I’m optimistic that we (Jim) will get our therapy tub running soon. We alternate feeling discouraged, grinding our teeth over money spent, another $300.00, shared cost. We are in a country where, instead of saying, ‘It’s broken, throw it away, buy a new one’, people say, ‘It can be fixed’. We like that philosophy.

            Friends like to chide us for wanting hot water soaks since May is the hottest month of our year with temperatures in the high 90’s every day.

But I know from experience, years of nightly soaks, that hot water eases muscle pains, whether the weather is stifling or freezing. 

Believe me, dripping sweat ain’t the same thing.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

May 31, 2018

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The Conception, Growth and Development of My In-House Out-House

The Conception, Growth and Development of My In-House Out-House

                A gray compact car eased up to the curb in front of my house. Two women got out and started up my walk. I had seen them drive up so I met them at the door. They seemed hesitant. A bit red-faced. One of them asked, “May we see your bathroom?”

                “Oh, of course.” I was relieved that the purpose of their visit was neither religious nor political. “Come in.” I’m used to strangers who knock on my door and ask for the bathroom tour. Generally, they follow the request with “so and so told us about it” or “we heard about it”.

                I didn’t set out to design a weird bathroom. I merely wished to solve a problem.  What I really wanted was a hot tub. In my former home I had one off my back deck, out my bedroom door. I soaked at least once every day.  But I knew when I renovated my house in Harlem adding a hot tub would be out of the question. There wasn’t an appropriate place to put one nor could I afford it. Owning a hot tub is like owning a miniature swimming pool. You pay the price.

                I shopped for restored claw-foot tubs. Too expensive. I looked at new retro claw-foot tubs. Yikes! I had another problem too. My bathroom was tiny. 1970’s tiny. Barely room to turn around.

                One day at the mall in Havre I parked way out on the eastern edge of the parking lot and skirted around the fencing and farm stuff on my way to the Big R. I walked past stacks of stock tanks, several sizes and shapes. I stopped in my tracks. I whipped out my tape measure. I had found the solution to my deep tub problem. Now all I needed to do was to make it work.

                “Billie,” I said to the man helping me with some of the odd jobs of house renovation, “Look at this stock tank I just bought? Do you think we can plumb it into the bathroom for my tub?”

                He raised his eyebrows at me and said, “Who is this ‘we’?”

                “You,” I gulped.

He nodded. “Yep, I can do it”. Billie is talented, patient and kind.

                “While we are at it, I mean while you are at it, what about turning this rustic oak dresser of mine into a sink vanity. I’d like to use the old sink and then I’d be the only woman in the world with an apple green sink. And can you fix it so I can still use the drawers?”

                As in all remodeling projects, one idea led to another. “Billie, let’s surround, I mean, could you surround the tub with cedar?” I asked. Then Billie thought we might lower the ceiling a few inches above the tub. “Yes, great idea. And let’s lower the ceiling over the dresser too,” I added. “We can put cedar wainscoting around the whole room. I’ll attach burlap above the wainscoting. And we can prop up this old ladder for a towel rack. And what do you think of this tile for the floor?”

                As the bathroom project began coming together everything looked good except for one thing. The modern white ceramic toilet looked like an onion in the petunia patch. “Hmmm,” I said and watched Billy flinch. Could we—I mean, you—surround the toilet and the tank with cedar? I’ll go get a wooden seat.” And out the door I sailed.

                The only things missing from my indoor outhouse were the moon on the door, the Sears catalog on the floor, and a wasp nest up in the corner. Jay Anderson from Turner made me a metal quarter moon. I dispensed with the other accouterments.

My new facility looks mighty authentic. Of course, the old two-holer down the path out back never had an aqua mosaic sea horse hanging above the tub, nor a gallery of western art around the other walls, nor the fresh smells of cedar and lavender, nor the pull chain flush mechanism. And when I step in the doorway I don’t have to check for rattlesnakes.

                I’m proud to show off my creation. A friend suggested,  “ Why not make your house available for tour groups? You could charge admission and make a fortune.”

 “To see the bathroom?” I asked.

                “Not just it. Your whole house is weird,” he said. “Think about it, if you made enough money you could live like normal people.”

                Why would I want to, I thought, while I threaded curtains I had made from vintage-fabric  onto plumbing pipe and popped tennis ball finials over the pipe-ends.  Normal?

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

May 10, 2012

Up To My Neck in Hot Water

Up to My Neck in Hot Water
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It was a night much like tonight. The wind whipped sheets of snow around the corner of the house, ice rimed every surface. Snow piled in drifts which the wind, like a restless housewife, never satisfied, picked up, dragged elsewhere, then shoved back again. Temperatures had plummeted and settled with no notion of moving upward. Aspen , Karla and I sat on the floor in my living room playing rummy. The boys kneeled in the opposite corner, constructing fantastical buildings with Legos.

We were single women in Missoula , raising children, and adrift in the same boat of poverty. Karla did odd jobs about town. Aspen worked at St. Pat’s and raised two children she had not birthed but loved just the same. I put an ad in the paper and called myself the “Scissors Wizard”. I hemmed blue jeans, replaced zippers in ski jackets, and altered chiffon formals. If it could be done with a needle and thread, I did it.

Our pleasures were few, simple and mostly of our own contrivance. I had moved to town late in the fall and these women were new-found friends. Karla said, “Let’s bundle up the boys and drive out to Sleeping Child.”

Aspen walked to the window and looked outside. “In this mess? My jeep won’t even start.”

“What is ‘Sleeping Child’?” I asked. “ Hot springs ,” they answered in unison.

We emptied our purses and pockets into a pool on the floor and counted the loot. Entry was only a dollar or two and we could stay as many hours as we wanted. We had enough money leftover to put gasoline in Karla’s clunker. Mine was sitting out front with a flat tire. It would sit there a couple more weeks. I had a block of commodity cheese and a loaf of bread so I made sandwiches. Aspen lived a couple blocks across the park. She ran home and came back with orange juice. Karla had brought over brownies for later. We were set.

We packed the boys and our winter picnic lunch into the backseat of Karla’s beast of a car and headed south out of town to Sleeping Child. We undressed in the change house and, nearly naked in our bathing suits, skittered and slipped through the snow, across the ice. The boys dived into the large pool and frolicked about. We eased into the smaller hot pool. As our limbs relaxed, we basked in the heat, watched the steam roll off our shoulders. We floated and gazed, mesmerized, at the star-studded sky. Some time later fat snowflakes drifted lazily into the hot waters. On the way home we all sang songs until our worn-out boys fell asleep. Then we women, sated by the warm waters, quietly shared our fears and hopes to the tune of the tires shooshing along the snowy road.

Thereafter, nearly every week, seduced by hot water, we loaded food and boys into whosever car was running and drove out of town. We went to Lolo Hot Springs, at that time housed in a primitive barn. Sometimes we drove to Paradise and Quinn’s Hot Springs . If the roads allowed, we crossed into Idaho to Jeremiah Johnson Hot Springs , a series of bubbling pools in the briskly flowing Lochsa River .

When I moved to Washington I traded hot springs for a hot tub on my back deck, which my family and I used daily. It wasn’t the same and I missed my friends. Oh, the kids and I occasionally trekked to Olympic Hot Springs, where numerous thermal pools snuggled into the hillsides, a short drive and a long hike into the mountains near Port Angeles .

What had begun as a subtle seduction had turned into an addiction. So twenty five years later I returned to Harlem , hooked on hot water. And I had a dilemma. Sleeping Buffalo , the nearest hot spring, was a bit of a drive, though I did avail myself of its pleasures now and then. I wanted to sink to my ears in hot water every day. Most bathtubs are useless for soaking. The tubs that were deep enough cost too much, were huge and inappropriate for my tiny 1970’s bathroom. I could not afford to buy, maintain and heat a hot tub. What was a woman to do?

One day in Havre I drove up the hill to Big R and parked. Right in front of me, stacked behind the fence, in a variety of sizes and shapes, sat the solution to my problem. I nearly danced with excitement. I took some measurements, drove home and took some more measurements, drove back and bought a galvanized stock water-trough for a mere seventy dollars.

Then I proceeded to rip apart my bathroom, plumbed in the trough, lined the walls with cedar and burlap, propped an ancient wooden ladder in place of a towel rack, installed an old dresser to hold my sink, and built an outhouse surround for the commode. The traditional quarter moon on the door completed my rustic in-house out-house.

Let the wind roar, the snow fall, the drifts pile and shift and bury all evidence of yards and sidewalks and streets. Let the ice build and snow and cold have their way. Tonight I am in my own tub, in my own home, steam wafting off my shoulders, up to my neck in hot water.
Sondra Jean Ashton
Havre Daily News: Looking out my back door
January 7, 2010
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