Well, it rained.
An ADEL came and gave us a little life.
Where we were dried out like raisins, it offered us a few drops to breathe.
A quick breath — not enough to fill our lungs.
This isn’t the ‘finally’ we say when the first rains come. I say this not because the first rains aren’t a welcome ‘finally’, but because we know ourselves. For many, this ‘finally’ means:
What water shortage? Problem solved.
NO.
No problem is solved with just two rains and a lightning strike.
Our life is like lightning, but we have time… to feel real thirst — to borrow from Kazantzakis.
If you’re broke and find a twenty, you’re not really rich. You can relax about your next meal and some fuel for the car. But soon enough, you’ll be broke again.
If you start an essay and write the intro, sure, you don’t have a blank page anymore, but you still don’t have an essay.
This is kind of like what happened during Lady Adel’s brief visit that darkened our skies.
But going from that to washing courtyards with hoses, wanting to wash an apple while leaving the tap running for a minute and a half, or showering just for fun — there’s a huge gap between these two situations.
And I’m talking about those who care and understand water scarcity. Some people (and they’re not a small group) still waste water like we live in Alaska, thinking we can just melt ice to drink.
Sadly, we live in a place that doesn’t get much rain. We need to make careful water use part of our culture. Even when dams fill up now and then or if it rains for 20 days straight — which happens as often as the Olympics every four years — EVEN then we can’t let our guard down with water.
If we keep in mind the fear of sudden water shortages, since here it’s normal to think of ‘abundance’ that way, we can look at the future SLIGHTLY more positively.
Otherwise, it’s never too late to clear out coastal holiday homes and hotels and set up desalination systems. We could replace our pools with water collectors and other big ideas so that neither we nor our kids have to fight over water — like we used to joke about: the (civil) war for water.
Papa – Ratsis
