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Though the response of most suburbanites in weather like this would be to just give in and scour the Sears for air conditioners still available on sale, my response is to take a lot of cool baths. Short ones, sometimes a few in the evening. I don't water my lawn, probably much to the distress of my neighbors (though they were more distressed the year we didn't get to mowing it for some time, but that's another story), so I don't feel guilty about filling the bathtub often. My favorite wintertime long bath indulgence is homemade bath salts made with lavender essential oil, but for summer cooldowns, it's got to be Dr. Bronner's Peppermint Soap.
I first ran into Dr. Bronner's Peppermint Soap during yoga classes, when I was a grad student in St. Louis. We'd do the physical workout portion of the class, then all retreat to take a quick shower before the more meditative portion of the class. The first time I used it --it was all they had in the showers there -- I felt transformed. By soap! It's a mild castille soap blended with a large amount of pure peppermint oil. It's soap that gives you an exceptional sensory impression of becoming clean and refreshed. Sure, it stings a bit on cuts and mucous membranes, but in a way that's part of the appeal. The man I was attending those classes with didn't actually turn out to be interested in me, and my interest in the yoga faded, but the memory of that soap remained.
The other amazing thing about this soap is that it comes with lunatic religious tracts, all over the package. Dr. Bronner, since sometime in the fifties, sold his soap with a paper label covered with tiny words, instructions to inspire us with the Moral ABC's, a kind of Essene profession of All-One-God-Faith to unite and save our world (“Spaceship Earth”, to him), as the philosophy of Abraham-Israel-Moses-Buddha-Hillel-Jesus-Spinosa-Paine-Sagan and Mohammed teaches. His kids took over the company when he died in 1997, and changed the labeling some, notably by printing it directly on the plastic bottles, as the paper one did tend to fall off in the shower after a while. They renamed them “Magic Soaps”, though Dr. Bronner himself wouldn't have been quite that pretentious about it, took off the notes on the label about using it for things like birth control (by adjusting the pH of the vagina) and mouthwash, and added notes that the soap clouds at lower temperatures and clears at higher ones, that the product is not tested on animals, the website address, and other more modern sorts of stuff.
I still buy this stuff at the Greenstar Food Co-op in Ithaca, when I go to visit, along with my B-grade maple syrup and my echinacea extracts, and my beeswax for candlemaking that comes from the bottom of the bin and has occasional dead bees in it, and the mystery nut butter. Even though Dr. Bronner's passion, to a certain degree, has develoved into a marketing gimmick for us aging-hippie types, and even though I'm personally dubious about the idea of the world needing All-One-God-Faith, I wish more products available today still had that much real personality. Plus, it's still just really good soap.
I first ran into Dr. Bronner's Peppermint Soap during yoga classes, when I was a grad student in St. Louis. We'd do the physical workout portion of the class, then all retreat to take a quick shower before the more meditative portion of the class. The first time I used it --it was all they had in the showers there -- I felt transformed. By soap! It's a mild castille soap blended with a large amount of pure peppermint oil. It's soap that gives you an exceptional sensory impression of becoming clean and refreshed. Sure, it stings a bit on cuts and mucous membranes, but in a way that's part of the appeal. The man I was attending those classes with didn't actually turn out to be interested in me, and my interest in the yoga faded, but the memory of that soap remained.
The other amazing thing about this soap is that it comes with lunatic religious tracts, all over the package. Dr. Bronner, since sometime in the fifties, sold his soap with a paper label covered with tiny words, instructions to inspire us with the Moral ABC's, a kind of Essene profession of All-One-God-Faith to unite and save our world (“Spaceship Earth”, to him), as the philosophy of Abraham-Israel-Moses-Buddha-Hillel-Jesus-Spinosa-Paine-Sagan and Mohammed teaches. His kids took over the company when he died in 1997, and changed the labeling some, notably by printing it directly on the plastic bottles, as the paper one did tend to fall off in the shower after a while. They renamed them “Magic Soaps”, though Dr. Bronner himself wouldn't have been quite that pretentious about it, took off the notes on the label about using it for things like birth control (by adjusting the pH of the vagina) and mouthwash, and added notes that the soap clouds at lower temperatures and clears at higher ones, that the product is not tested on animals, the website address, and other more modern sorts of stuff.
I still buy this stuff at the Greenstar Food Co-op in Ithaca, when I go to visit, along with my B-grade maple syrup and my echinacea extracts, and my beeswax for candlemaking that comes from the bottom of the bin and has occasional dead bees in it, and the mystery nut butter. Even though Dr. Bronner's passion, to a certain degree, has develoved into a marketing gimmick for us aging-hippie types, and even though I'm personally dubious about the idea of the world needing All-One-God-Faith, I wish more products available today still had that much real personality. Plus, it's still just really good soap.
