Being Thankful

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I thought I would write a post about something for which I'm especially thankful.  To be honest, the first thing that came to mind is our upstairs bathroom.  This is something that I thank God for daily.  Now please, don't be offended.  Give me a chance to explain myself.

When my smarty-pants husband and I first got married, we were living in a small one-bedroom apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  While I am thankful that he was smart enough to get paid to go to school and not the other way around, I must say that the sum he was getting paid for his smarts wasn't all that amazing.  So, we rented an apartment that was on the very low end of the price range in the area.  At a mere $900 a month, plus utilities and laundry, it was a steal.  But of course, there is a reason it cost a mere $900 a month.  The apartment was situated in the basement of a six-unit building.  The floor was all hard, cold tile.  The heat was pumped through vents at the top of the apartment--enabling us to spend a lot of money to heat the apartment above us.  I am sure they were very thankful for our help in subsidizing their heating bills.  One of our biggest difficulties in the winter was that the pipes in the bathroom were too close to the outside walls.  Every time the temperatures would drop outside (which happened often, of course, it being New England and all), our pipes would freeze.  Thankfully, this only applied to the toilet and the sink, not the bathtub.  But, it meant that we had to wash our hands in the tub, and then manually refill the toilet water.... Ahh, the life of young newlyweds in the city.

The next winter, we had a small child and after just a few weeks of this, I had more than enough.  Finally, someone came to put in some insulation between the pipes and the outside wall.  The bathroom itself (and the rest of the apartment) was still ridiculously cold.  But at least we didn't have to manually refill the toilet water anymore.  Living in luxury.

It was four years ago that we spent our winter filling and refilling a bucket from our tub.  I won't ever forget it.  Every year when the temperatures drop and winter creeps into the air, I am thankful that we won't be spending our time doing that again.  And this year, we even figured out a way to let the temperature get hotter in the shower!  Maybe I won't actually have to put an electric heater in there to keep from shivering.  I'll tell you what, working plumbing and hot water are definitely big things to be thankful for.