Drip-drying

When I was young, I preferred to drip-dry. 
I would sit on the toilet lid, wrapped in my bath sheet, toes probing the plush burgundy carpet (this was the 1980s, an era of blissful ignorance as to the bacterial load of a deep-pile bathroom carpet) and I would daydream myself dry. 
Sometimes, Mum would come in to check on me, and smile. 
Drip-drying again, Rozanne? 
And I think, maybe, she would sometimes rub my shoulders or back dry for me. Maybe. 
There was an intimacy, anyway - not just from the contact between heavy towel and damp skin, but from the rata-tat-tat on the bathroom door, and her affection for my passive drying habits. 
I also loved to linger on the landing. Like a bird on a branch, I would settle myself on the top stair and listen to the sounds and pockets of silence wafting up, wending their way around the tendrils of ironwork on the banister. 

As of two weeks and two days ago, I am fifty-five years old. And still I have an inclination towards drip-drying and daydreaming. 

It struck me last night as - with a heaviness in my arms - I rubbed my fraying pink bath towel over myself - it struck me that, back when growth was happening organically, which is to say all by itself, to my body, time and I were on amiable terms. 
All those minutes adding up to hours, hours of minutes... On my stairtop perch; cocooned in terry-towelling; entranced by the pretty Laura Ashley wallpaper in my bedroom… They were a tacit agreement between Old Father Time and me, that there was no rush, nothing else to do or be. Why hurry the transition from warm bath to cool bed sheets, when you can drip-dry! Let things happen in their own way. 
Of course, I was a child and had no adulting to attend to, hour in, hour out. No responsibilities other than to not make anyone angry. 
Yet it was more than that, wasn't it? 
When we are still physically growing, it is as if the naturalness of that holds our inner scales in balance. There’s no adding or subtracting of weights and counterweights…
And this is a thing I have really come to know, lately.

Oh, but I should say:
I don't mean everything was all, or even mostly balanced and harmonious when I was growing, of course it wasn’t!
And maybe that was one reason for my daydreaming: forming quiet little rock pools in my head. 

But now -and this is important for me to say, because I am getting to a point, to something that feels true: now, in advanced middle age, I think growth might not be appropriate anymore. 
Not in the way we are told it should happen, as adults, when our bodies have stopped growing and so we look to our minds to keep the momentum going. And/or: we grow other things around us, to waymark our progression when we can no longer do that simply by marking a pencil line on the wall. 

Oh, what AM I trying to say? 

This is the trouble with drip-dried thoughts: their essence evaporates while you're not paying attention, like drops of bathwater. I am daydreaming these words onto the page and so they are crabs in a rock pool, scuttling into crevices. Fronds of seaweed, drifting around a truth too aqueous for words. I mean, you cannot actually, properly touch water, can you?
Only by lightly skimming its surface. 
Otherwise, anything more, and the water is very much touching you, or holding or submerging you, and truth is a lot like that. It holds you, but by that point you cannot describe it, because you are mostly just feeling it. And if you distil it into a container, well, you can’t fully feel it anymore.

Anyway. 
When we grow up, and become a little concerned with Making The Most of our time, and with the anticipation of future memories – 
oh! how I LOATHE that hashtag, making memories… 
Because the memories, the best ones I have from being young, they weren't made. They simply were. 
The bigness of my bath towel. The slant of the stairs and how the light arranged itself on the treads. The sound of that secret waterfall in Coverdale and how it grew and grew, from a whisper to a roar, as you scrambled towards it. The yielding of the soft foam on the reclining deck chairs - the LUXURY of a reclining deck chair, indeed! -and the sweet, crunchy deliciousness of Mum's roast potatoes. 

And still I cannot quite convey the knowing that came to me, as I perched on the rim of the bathtub last night, and realised I would still, aged fifty-five, rather drip-dry. 

Except… It was something about how that was, and still is, the essence of me. Something essential, anyway. 
A part of me on good and amicable terms with time, despite the mounting evidence everywhere, and in every crease and crumple of my face, of just how very quickly it passes, in our perceiving of it. In our living of it.
It’s a part of me I would very much like to spend more time with, in my fifty-sixth year on earth. 
Little moments to shield my body from the world, to wrap the pause around me, and daydream myself dry.

Thank you for drip-drying with me. I'm glad you're here.