Bucket Baths

The shower in the home of my host family has a showerhead and a nozzle in which to turn on water but I have never actually used it and instead, take bucket baths which are heated with water from a tea kettle to a temperature just above glacier. This morning while dumping such a bucket of water over my head, I realized that the nozzle for the shower has a little red dot on it. This red dot screams, “I am used for hot water!” It’s ironic that this dot for so long had such significance in my life and now such symbols are absolute and have lost all meaning because I know that if I indeed did turn that knob (and we happened to have water at that moment) the water would freezing and that sticking to my slightly warmer bucket bath is the way to go.