I actually try not to take baths too often, for reasons both noble and not. The noble one is that I live in California, which is not the most well-watered state in the Union; driving down to San Diego for World Fantasy, I saw lots of signs on fences in the Valley railing against water shortages. Baths are kind of wasteful, and so I try to save them for occasional use. The less-noble reason is that, well, I’ve mostly lived in places with tubs that are Not Quite Big Enough to be really comfortable. Some day, my friends, I will live somewhere with a proper tub, both long enough and deep enough to accomodate an adult human of average size.

But baths, man. I may have a lot of feline characteristics in my temperament, but I’m the kind of cat who adores water. The ocean, a lake, a swimming pool, just let me at it. And it’s lovely to be able to sink back in a hot tub or bath or whatever and let the tension just soak out of me.

And — as I mentioned in an earlier post — it’s so easy now. Turn on the tap, and clean, hot water comes out. No need to stoke up the fire, haul water from the well, and fill the tub one bucketful at a time. I know this is not a luxury enjoyed by everyone in the world, and so I’d like to take a moment to be properly thankful for it.

No, not my birthday; my date of birth. Which is to say, September first. I was born early, though I’m not sure by how much (I used to think my due date was the eleventh, but recently my mother said otherwise, and now I can’t remember what date she said). But really, the amount doesn’t matter — just the result.

Why does it matter? Because my school district, like most, had guidelines for determining when children should start kindergarten. You had to be five or older by the cut-off date. And what was that date?

September first.

I don’t know how strictly that was enforced. Maybe if I’d been born a few days later, I still could have started school that year. As it was, they gave my mother the choice, to start me or hold me back. Given that I was already a ferocious reader, she opted to boot me out the door and into kindergarten. And for that, I am more thankful than I can say.

People who would probably not have been in my life if I had started school a year later: kurayami_hime. She would have been two years ahead of me, instead of one, and we likely would not have become friends — at least not such close friends that these days, my parents refer to her as their other daughter. kniedzw: even if I still went to Harvard, he would have been more than a year out of college rather than recently graduated when I showed up, and by then would have distanced himself more from the friends he still had in school. We would not have begun dating, and I would not be married to him now. teleidoplex; it’s unlikely I would have gone to the Castell Henllys field school in 2000, which means we would not have met there. And while I still might have gone to Indiana University for graduate school (thus giving us a second chance to meet), I don’t know that I would have ended up playing in the Bloomington Changeling LARP — which created most of my social circle for six years, shaped my academic research, and led to me running Memento, the tabletop game that ended up inspiring the Onyx Court novels.

. . . to name just a few.

This is not to say I would have had no awesome friends, boyfriend/husband, or adopted sister had I entered school a year later. In both high school and college, I had friends a year behind me; I probably would have been closer to them in this alternate history, and they are very cool people, too. But you know what? I like my life. I like the path it’s followed. And so much of it is the coincidental result of being at particular points in the educational system at particular times. Shift me back a year, and a lot of the things I’m happiest with suddenly vanish, to be replaced by god knows what.

Dear Mom: thank you for sending me off to kindergarten on my fifth birthday, rather than holding me back an additional year. And thank you to whatever gestational butterfly flapped its wings and caused me to enter this world on September first, just a little bit ahead of schedule.

I grew up in Dallas, lived there for eighteen years. I don’t care that my ancestry is largely Scandinavian and Swiss German; I don’t like the cold. I am a creature of sunlight and warmth.

At this time of year, and for the next five months or so, you can be damn certain I am thankful for central heating, which for is the difference between living, and living in hell.

. . . now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go create a conflict between a previous object of gratitude and this one, by standing in the cold for three hours or so.

I lived for about five years in places without a dishwasher. (Well, longer than that — but the four years in college don’t count, since all I had to do was dump my tray at the appropriate spot in the dining hall.)

I am so very, very thankful to have one again.

Dishes fall into that deeply annoying category of “didn’t I just do this chore?” No sooner have you cleaned them up than, oh look, there’s another dirty plate. Laundry is the same way, and words cannot express how glad I am that I’ve never had to do that by hand. The one time I ever tried was with a pair of trousers when I was at a field station in the middle of the rainforest in Costa Rica; I got about a minute in, very feebly, before a pair of hands appeared in my field of vision and took the soap and trousers away. I watched the very nice Costa Rican lady do what my fourteen-year-old self could not, and marveled as if she were turning water in to wine. Combine that with my reading about what it used to take to do laundry in the pre-washing-machine past . . . yeah. There are entire months of my life that have been saved by me not having to do laundry by hand.

Dishwashers. Laundry machines. Vacuum cleaners. Hell, showers — even bathing used to be a bigger undertaking, back when you had to heat the water and fill the tub and so on. Be thankful, people. Be very, very thankful.

When la_marquise_de_ and I were doing the podcast thing at World Fantasy, one of the things that came up was the sheer physical discomfort people used to live with as a matter of course.

Now, I know that there are many people ven now — possibly some of you reading this — who likewise live with chronic pain, disease, injury, disability, or other such conditions. I have no desire to trivialize those things. But taking the long perspective . . . my god. Things have improved so much in the last century or so, I can barely even conceive of it.

I’m talking about everything from the major achievements (smallpox used to kill or disfigure vast numbers of people; now it’s been eradicated) down to the minor ones (most of us still have all our teeth, and they’re probably pretty straight, too). Thanks to vaccinations — but no thanks to the anti-vax movement, which I won’t rant about here because this is supposed to be about thankfulness — we no longer have to run the gauntlet of measles and mumps and rubella and whooping cough and everything else that used to drop children like flies. We have antibiotics: no more “and by the way he spent the last three years of life with a supperating ulcer in his thigh” for us! We can repair torn ligaments, use hearing aids to combat deafness, replace freaking hip joints, man. If I didn’t have astigmatism, or U.S. had approved toric ICLs already, I could get a lens permanently implanted in my eye to correct my vision.

Dude, Beck Weathers lost his nose to frostbite, and they grew a new one for him on his forehead.

So while I extend my heartfelt sympathies to everyone who suffers from ill-health of one kind or another — my GOD am I thankful for modern health. If you threw me into the European past, I would not want to be treated by any doctor from before maybe 1940 or so. (I don’t know enough about the history of medicine in other parts of the world to make judgment calls there, except to say that Europe was late to the smallpox-vaccination party.) I’m sure any number of things we do today will be considered barbaric and dumb by the people of the future, but from where I’m standing, we’ve made amazing progress.