The trip to the Turkish hammam was my husband’s idea. He’d been to a hammam in Jordan, back when his skin was more resilient, and that experience had gone down in history as one of his more painful experiments in public bathing. His only, in fact.
Because we’re North American, we worried about the sarong provided to each of us upon arrival, a length of cotton not quite wide enough to cover all the essential areas. Had it just been me and my husband we wouldn’t have worried so much about what we should cover, but friends of ours from Canada vacationing with us had come with us to the hammam.
…. So, here’s what happened to this post. A writer friend of mine read this post and told me it was worth developing into something more substantial, telling more of a story, bringing out some of the themes of public/private, sexuality/tenderness, and that I should work on it, then send it out to try to get it published. That’s what I’ve done.