water

The past couple of weeks have been an interesting experience for me. While being aware of the importance of water, and respecting and being grateful for its availability and quality, I was never worried about it--at least not in recent memory.

I have memories of water being a concern when I was a child with my parents in Africa, but here we are, our cistern ran dry during the heat of the last couple of weeks. We use the cistern only for watering the garden. All the other water we use, for cooking, bathing, etc., comes from the well. Now, the cistern is filled by a downspout that brings in rainwater off our roof, and the cistern was quite full before our hot spell. We had some new plantings (the re-furbished beds around the house and the vegetable gardens) so watering was kinda necessary or we lose plants.

When I realized the cistern was dry, we started hoping for rain. We were not going to use the well to water the gardens, as Ann said the well did run dry last summer. (Odd, that, as we had a very rainy summer last year, and the doc said the well had never run dry before in his memory.) So, we resorted to saving the water from dish-washing and showers, recycling it. I soon developed a healthy respect for those African women and girls who walk miles with heavy jars of water on their heads! I found lugging buckets down stairs from the bathroom out to the garden worked up a sweat quite quickly!