Happy World Day for Water!

Today is the World Day for Water. It kind of makes me thirsty just to think about it... I got a kit once from my cousin that contained everything you would need to put on a miniature play, including two scripts. One was silly, I don't remember it very well, something about all the different fairy tales getting mixed up in each others' stories, but the second one was about the future. A little boy's grandmother takes him back in time (to our time) to show him how it used to be, when clean water was so abundant that people could actually drink it out of the tap, and wash in it whenever they felt like it! It made me think long and hard about the way things might be one day. I "received a very deep impression," as they say in Chinese. Plus it was ironic, because at the time I really couldn't drink water out of the tap.

We actually had a whole system for drinking water - filled the kettle from the faucet, heated it until it had boiled for ten or fifteen minutes, then poured the water into the first hot water thermos. The cap to yesterday's hot water thermos was loosened so that the water would be cool by the next day, and a third thermos held (finally) cold, drinkable water. Cold boiled water has a particular taste, probably from a combination of the metallic precipitate at the bottom of the tea kettles and from sitting still for so long. Whenever we were back in the States, it felt so fresh and daring to drink from the tap. Or a water fountain! Wow. You Americans really do live the life... At the time, though, boiling water wasn't really something I thought about, any more than I thought about having to soak fresh vegetables in iodine or always peeling apples. It was the same, I guess, as filling the dishwasher here, or mowing the lawn - something I have still never done. Or in other places, carrying water from the river and herding goats. You're used to the little ways you live your life, and you don't realize until you step outside of it just how strange they are.

Post Script: UNEP photo contest: http://www.unep.org/photocomp2005/
They had some of these posted on the msn website, but you really should look at all 25. Disappointed that they wouldn't let me download any of them - I literally stopped breathing when I saw number 6...