“May I get you a cool dipper from the WELL??”
Okay so remember that line from the old school Rogers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella that used to play yearly in the 70’s? I do. I thought it was such a clever and sweet way to begin a conversation with the Prince! So hear is what invoked that memory last week…I carried 2 big five gallon glass bottles of water into my home last week for drinking and cooking.All the while I was thinking, damn these are so heavy, and then my mind traveled back to when I was about 7 and visiting my Aunt Clara and Uncle Kent’s camp near Lake Ontario in Cape Vincent, New York. Cape Vincent is a quaint little town by the shores of the lake and coincidently where my parents first lived right after they got married and opened their first restaurant “Fiaschetti’s Spaghetti!” Their wedding reception was at the restaurant and of course their first meal together as a married couple was SPAGHETTI!!By now your thinking okay about the water Bernadette (snap snap)!? Well…so let me tell you, at the camp there was ZERO running water. Which of course means there was no indoor bathroom or a Squatty Potty. I am missing my emoji’s right now! And, yes I am drinking while I write. :)So my mind it went back in time when I carried in buckets of water to the kitchen sink to do dishes at the family camp, it took myself and at least one other cousin two trips. Then I started thinking like way back to the colonial days or the wild west and what it must have been like to wash dishes, wash clothes, bathe or shower. Oh my god! Seriously, how hard each day must have been, seriously…seriously hard. Back in the day you had to go to the well. Think about that for a few minutes. No matter what the weather. I can tell you in New York that would be brutal on a January day. Really brutal, great exercise, but none the less brutal.Am I crazy for thinking that perhaps the increase in disease, all disease is directly related not only to the quality of our water but how effortlessly in pours out of our sinks making us lazy and frivolous?Then my mind went to how much water would we waste if we had to hand carry it into our houses everyday, day after day? Most of us, including myself, take water for granted like it will always be there, and that it will always be safe.But it’s not safe. It’s tainted and it is becoming more and more toxic every day in industrialized countries more and more scarce. So the point of this post is to just to bring awareness. We have to work together to protect our water. Water is life. Conserve it as if you had to carry it.-Bern
