ManicDDaily

Hot Water Bottle (Remembered)

I’m all for solar power, wind power, and other renewable alternatives to fossil fuels.  But during last night’s bitter cold, which was especially frigid in Battery Park City (where I live), the prow of the stationary ship which is Manhattan, I discovered an eminently traditional, and yet not fully tapped, form of alternative energy (i.e. heat).  The hot water bottle.

Seriously.  It was terrific. Better than wool socks.  (Maybe not as good as a nearby warm body, but warm bodies don’t necessarily put up with cold feet other than their own.)

As a caveat, I should say that I keep my apartment relatively (my kids say, ‘extremely’) cool (my kids say, ‘freezing’) in winter.  Besides trying to keep my carbon footprint to a toeprint, I find hot air heat too dry.   This means that I basically turn all the heat off at night.  (Okay, so maybe my kids are right.)

But last night called for measures beyond wool socks, a down comforter, and even a nearby warm body.

I have to confess to a past prejudice against hot water bottles, their rubbery exteriors so (potentially, at least) slimy and nubbly.  Besides my innate repugnance, my only personal experience with hot water bottles was in Mussoorie, India, a town in the foothills of the Himalayas, bordering Rishikesh (the hang-out of Maharaji Mahesh Yogi the Beatles’ guru)  and Dehra Dun (a favorite locale of Rudyard Kipling).

Mussoorie, though a very nice town, probably sounds more romantic than it is, at least when you are there alone, as I was.   It was green, hilly, and, on the small main road had a small boy who ran alongside a single thin wheel which he propelled with a stick.   On a clear day, there was a tower you could climb where you could supposedly see Tibet.  (I was not there on any clear days.)

Other than that, all I remember about Mussoorie is that it was very cold at night and that in my guest house, a remnant of the Raj, guests were distributed hot water bottles after dinner.  These, a sickly blue green, were covered in a worn crochet of thick bright red and purple yarn;  up by the corked top was a dog-eared yarn flower.

My memory of these hot water bottles is somewhat muddled by the baths in that same hotel.  The tubs were portable, small and tin, just about big enough for a squat.  When I came back to the hotel in the late afternoons, there was, next to the little tin tub, a very large aluminum tea kettle coated in an even larger quilted tea cozy.  Though the water in this kettle was close to boiling (depending upon when one came back to the room), there was only enough to fill the very cold noisy tub to the depth of an inch or two.  I remember taking all baths in at least one wool sweater.

Unfortunately, the crochet-covered hot water bottle and the tea-cozy-covered bath water became inextricably linked in my mind.  As a result, I always thought of hot water bottles with a shiver from the waist down.

Until last night, that is, when my husband, in response to the buzzing cold of my feet,  found a dark red hot water bottle in the back of a bathroom cabinet, and filled it up to the brim.

What a revelation!  My own little heat pillow.  My own little adjustable portable hearth.   At virtually no cost!  Using minimal fossil fuel!

Okay, so, it sounds silly.  But it also seems a useful paradigm for reducing U.S. energy consumption.    Heating one small actually used space, as needed, instead of the nonstop heating of a whole apartment, or house.  A helpful idea even when oil has not yet gotten back up to $100 a barrel.  (News alert—it went over $81 today.)

No crochet required.



ps- if you prefer paintings of elephants to hot water bottles, check out 1 Mississippi by Karin Gustafson.