Hot Tub Time Machine
I got a killer massage at The Equinox in Manchester, VT this week and afterward, my friend, Janice and I put on our bathing suits and headed to the outdoor hot tub to soak while our other two friends enjoyed their fancy treatments.
We slipped out of the thick white spa robes and draped them on chairs by the indoor pool and walked out into the below-freezing Vermont air and into the welcomed heat of the steamy hot tub where a young mother was sitting with her school-aged daughter. We all chatted for a while about where we were from -- Connecticut vs. New Jersey -- while the girl hoisted herself out of the tub, the heat visibly coming off of her bright suit in steamy waves. She ran barefoot into the snow that she scooped into a tight ball and brought back into the hot tub to watch slowly melt into the blue water. A long overhang stretched over nearly the entire length of the tub and protected us from the constant drizzle that morning. The cold rain splashed into the end of the tub and if you drifted too close, it caught in your hair and bounced up from the heated water into your face.
Eventually, we were joined by another woman who looked to be in her early 30s wearing a low-cut black one-piece and an Islanders knit cap covering her hair. We learned that she’d moved out of Manhattan a year earlier and married in the fall and was staying nearby with a group of friends for a long ski weekend. She and her new husband had bought a place on Long Island and we discussed the challenges of visiting friends who’d moved from NYC to New Jersey and having to navigate impossible city traffic to get there, like Sleeping Beauty's prince forced to hack through a forest of deadly thorn bushes and battle a dragon to get to the castle. I told a story about having to conquer my terror of the Belt Parkway once to drive a daughter to JFK to leave for a semester abroad and she laughed when I shared that after, I told my daughter never to question my mothering again. “I love you so much I'm willing to drive back and forth to JFK alone,” I’d told her.
I interrogated asked our new friend questions about her life and we all exchanged our covid holiday stories – another common denominator for any of us living in the New York Tristate area this Christmas – as the heat rose from the blue-tinged tub that the young mother had warned us had turned the tips of her blonde pigtails green from soaking the day before.
Eventually, the mother and daughter left to check out and another young woman joined us and shared that she and her husband and young son were staying at The Equinox to celebrate her birthday. The four of us fell into easy conversation, mostly about geography and covid, and I felt the tub jet I’d positioned myself in front of pulsing hard into the sore spot on my back from driving four-plus hours north the night before. I'd ended up driving up alone and instructed Siri to play albums from my youth and drove north along the New York Thruway belting out songs from Bat Out of Hell and Hotel California, amazed that I can't remember where I put my reading glasses but could easily remember all the words to New Kid in Town.
Our group of four friends was supposed to have been on a five-night getaway to Sedona this weekend that we’d planned in early summer, not anticipating pending new jobs, foot injuries, and financial constraints that forced us to cancel at the last minute. Instead, we packed snow pants and Rummikub and headed to one of our friends’ homes near Stratton Mountain for a three-night getaway, which included spa treatments at The Equinox and a day-long ice storm that began late Thursday night that sealed us inside the condo for the rest of the trip like a super cozy igloo.
Before an ice storm moved in early Friday morning as we slept, we’d gone into Manchester for massages and facials at The Equinox and afterward a delicious lunch at a Turkish restaurant with bowls of silky hummus and smoky eggplant to scoop up with chunks of pillowy fresh-baked pita. We’d spend most of the rest of our time happily inside the condo watching a movie and the Olympics figure skating, reading our books and sharing our stories of life as women in their mid-50s. A lot like the new Sex and the City reboot minus Carrie’s wardrobes, Charlotte's tone-deaf parenting, and Miranda’s sexual renaissance.
Sitting in the hot tub with women a good 20 years my junior, I wondered if they felt like they were talking to their mom. My own child will turn 30 this year and is not too far away from moving out of Manhattan himself with a significant other, and not for the first time, looking up at the mountain shrouded in the distance by a heavy curtain of fog and the steady drips of rain falling around us, I thought about how life changes so slowly and suddenly. One minute we’re the cute girls wearing the knit hats with a dewy complexion and sense of wonder about what life holds. And the next, we’re staring down 60 and looking over our shoulders at all the years and milestones in our wake. Marriages and children and careers – both lost and found – and all the complexities of navigating them all.
And maybe for all of us, the common thread stitching all of the women of various ages and stages of life together in a hot tub -- from elementary school to empty nest -- was the known of where we were and the unknown of what lies ahead. We can just make it out, way off in the distance, but it’s foggy. And it’s raining. And we’ll just have to wait until we get closer to really see what it looks like. For now, all we can do is relax and sink into it. Feel the heat of it come off of us when we finally pull ourselves out of the tub and back into the cold air of reality.
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SUNDAY SHARES: Read, watch, cook, buy
For the last few months I have let my friend, Kathy, tell me what audiobook to listen to next. She is officially the boss of what I listen to while walking my dog or getting ready for work each day. Kathy is a voracious reader and audiobook-phile who has listened to novels by Melville, Proust, and Dostoevsky and knows I am never listening to anything by any of those authors. Instead, she recommends fiction that's off the beaten path of Reese's bookclub or whatever's on this week's bestseller list. And it's been great and gotten me out of my reading comfort zone and allowed me to discover writers and stories I wouldn't have found on my own. This week, I finished Sigrid Nunez's The Friend and it did not disappoint. A woman's friend, mentor and perhaps long-time love interest dies and she's left to care for his giant Great Dane and they navigate their shared grief in her tiny NYC apartment. Great narration, too.
As you can imagine, when four women get together for an ice storm, food is a big part of the equation. I had seen a recipe on Instagram for a Quinoa Berry Bake and threw it together before I left on Wednesday and it did not disappoint when we heated it back up Friday morning for a cozy breakfast while the rain fell outside. We topped with plain Greek yogurt and a drizzle of maple syrup (of course) and sliced strawberries and it was a hit.
We've stayed in some amazing Airbnbs over the years, from a charming home in the Catskills with a screened-in porch and patio for stargazing and cottage perched along the edge of the harbor in Newfoundland's St. John. Here was what awaited us in Sedona, with its firepit and panoramic views of the red rocks.
Finally, since there seems to be so much of it here in the Northeast this winter, the sound of snow. Or, more precisely, shinshin.
Wow. Thanks for reading. Seriously, you're the best.
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