The bliss of the late summer evening bath

Dear reader,

It is late May. The weather here has, this week, finally turned. The evenings are warm enough to leave the windows open. The light, even at eight in the evening, is the long slow gold of approaching summer. I have, this evening, just gotten out of a bath that, for reasons I want to write about, was one of the small specifically pleasurable baths of the year.

The bath was, structurally, the same Friday-evening bath I have written about elsewhere. The same Epsom salts. The same drops of oil. The same forty-five minutes. The variable that made it different was the open window, and the small evening sounds of the building and the street drifting in, and the slightly cool early-evening air arriving on the warm steam.

What the open window does for a summer bath

Several things. The acoustic environment is completely different. The closed bath is a closed acoustic environment — the small sounds of the bathroom, the small splashes of the water, the breath. The open bath includes the small ongoing acoustic life of the world outside — distant voices on the street, the small sound of a tram three streets away, the small birdsong of the early evening, the small mechanical sounds of the building cooling.

The temperature is also different. The closed bath is a steam environment — the bathroom warms quickly, the air saturates, the small contrast between the hot water and the air decreases. The open bath maintains a small temperature differential between the warm water and the slightly cooler air. The body, in this differential, feels the warm water more sharply on the parts submerged and the cool air more pleasantly on the parts above. The whole bath, with the open window, becomes a different kind of sensory experience.

On the small specific pleasure of summer baths

Summer baths are, generally, less common than winter baths. The cultural association of the warm bath is with cold weather. But the summer bath, taken with the windows open in the cool of the early evening, is a different kind of bath that I would, on the basis of recent evidence, recommend more highly.

The body, in the warm summer evening, is already relaxed in a way that the winter body is not. The warm water adds a small additional layer of relaxation rather than serving as the primary source of warmth. The open window provides the small acoustic and thermal variation that the closed winter bath does not. The whole experience is, in some way, more layered and more interesting than the simpler winter bath.

If you have, like me, mostly thought of baths as a winter activity, try one in late spring or early summer with the windows open in the cool evening. The bath will be different. The pleasure will be different. The small specific quality of a warm bath in cool air with the small evening world drifting in through an open window is, in my own opinion, one of the small overlooked pleasures of the season.

Until the next warm evening,

M.