when i was a little girl there used to be a sauna house run by this ancient hungarian woman and her even older mother. you'd go and pay your three or so dollars and you'd get a large fluffy white towel for your body, a smaller one for your hair, and a key for a locker. inside there were padded benches by the lockers with the radio piped in. beyond that there was a large while tiled room with showers and very large solid wooden massage tables, the sauna room was past that. it was an enormous room that was super hot and steamy. in the middle room and in the sauna there were always bunches of oak leaves bound together, i loved those. they were beautiful and fresh and smelled so amazing.
the ladies would gather every wednesday evening, all my mom's friends. many massages, facials and finger and toe nail painting along with gossip, raucous laughter, singing and hillarity. there were very old women who came too and they were the ones who used the bunches of oak leaves, the would sort of vigorously wisk their skin with them, i never knew why they did this but i loved those naked goddess witches with their bundles of tree leaves and their shuffling walk and cheek pinching friendliness.

orange pop, that was a cool treat i got sometimes. the can would sweat as much as we did, you had to drink it quick or it would get warm before you knew it.

my gosh, i had a fantastic childhood. hurrah for hippy mamas! hurrah hurrah hurrah!!

i looked it up, here's the low down on the oak leaf bundles...
[www.plentyofsteam.com]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/29/2008 02:14AM by coco.

That is a great story Coco.. it sounds like non fiction, real cool stuff.

It's great to have experiences likes those which in time will become pleasant moments of nostalgia to look back on.

great story coco .. would be nice if we as people still did stuff like this .. yer right you were lucky to grow up in with hippy mama

...Jodi, the banana eating buddhist

huh

that is interesting
i had a similar memory
of a sauna
but i was 2 years old or so at the time
so it is kind of blurry

just remember the steam the water the trickling sounds feeling like everyone was waaay taller than me
the smell of soap

water on the floor
water everywhere

people in water
water showers

water water water

beautiful memory

the bits i recall

you guys are so great. thanks for sharing your sauna memories with me too.
i spent time at eden hot springs in arizona when i was pregnant with little, i have pics of a whole crew of us nakkie in the olympic size pool surrounded by barrel cactus and desert beautiful.

I have a memory from about 17 years ago of derelict nostagia. I love empty run down forgotten places, especially when they are surreptetiosly in front of everyone. This memory was of such a place. There is an area in my city which is a spaghetti junction, and some of the branches pass under the main roads. One of the bridges of one of these main roads served as a buss stop as well.

I can't remember when I first noticed it, but by the time I was a teenager I used to use this bus stop on the way home from school. I would stare out of the windows from the bridge overlooking this motorway junction, and was always fascinated by this part which had obviously been built many years ago and had now been abandoned for one reason or another. This concrete monolith jutted out from below the bridge, a highway going nowhere. About 100 meters out it just stopped, hanging above the rest of the motorways in a timeless stasis.

I'd marvel at how deserted and still it always was, with weeds and small plants growing through the cracks as the sun beat down. It had been like that for well over 20 years. Then, in more recent times a novel development put a whole new spin on it. Our government in all its wisdom ,decided to ramp up our roading infrastructre. They obviously dredged up the long lost plans for this section of the highway and resumed working on it. About one year ago they finished it, and opened it up for use. Now I get to drive over the very spot I used to gaze at for all those years, and it buzzes me out every time !