As kids Tim and I have many memories of hot water bottles and soapstones. For the pre “Baby Boomer” generation these were instruments to keep warm in bed on cold winter nights and/or if you were sick and had chills. I wonder if you can even buy hot water bottles these days. I haven’t noticed any at Wal-Mart, but then again, I’ve never really looked for them. The good old-fashioned hot water bottles were made of red rubber and were an essential addition to my childhood cold-blooded always cold condition all winter. On really cold nights they would boil the water to fill the hot water bottle and that really helped to keep me toasty warm! I would take it, put it against my abdomen and wrap myself around it and feel the wonderful warmth under all the blankets on a cold winter night. Since we didn’t have much heat upstairs, this was a real necessity at least for me!

 

For a further description of how cold I got and why I have always detested winter, you can check the earlier story, “A BLANKET OF SNOW”.  The ideal situation was that I would fall asleep before the hot water got cold. Since I had chronic insomnia as a kid, it was rare that I would fall asleep with it still hot. Luke warm was the best I could usually do. One time when I was sick and home from school, I was on the sofa and since it was winter, I had my faithful hot water bottle under the blanket. One really neat alternate use I discovered at this time for a hot water bottle is to fire spit wads. I laid the hot water bottle on edge, pushed down the corner, and put a spit wad in the indented corner. I then gave the edge a quick karate chop resulting in the corner popping up and thus propelling the spit wad at high speed at the ceiling. As a result, whenever I was sick in the winter there would be several spit wads stuck on the living room ceiling over the sofa! This is just another example as kids of how Tim and I would take something innocuous in itself and make it into an instrument that would be fun for us but would drive all the adults crazy!

 

Since I have heat in my bedroom, I have never needed a hot water bottle, which is too bad because it would be fun to cover the ceiling with spit wads again, not to mention to be warm in the winter finally! Hmmmm, maybe I’ll check around and see if they still sell good old fashioned red rubber hot water bottles… FLASH! I just checked Yahoo Shopping and found that they do indeed still make red rubber hot water bottles and they cost $12.00. I think I’ll order one! (I also want to make sure I have a good supply of school notebook paper too, HEE HEE)!