Water Habits

I like to shower daily. My friend, Surdna, in the North of India, has a daily relationship with water too. She walks ten miles each morning, with two empty one gallon buckets that look a lot like an old Clorox gallon bottle. Round, firm, with that gritty grey sheen plastic gets when used a lot. She fills them up at a spigot, after standing in line a few and rests before returning to her home. She chats up her colleagues, giving new meaning to water cooler conversations. She walks back 10 miles to her home. After twenty miles, she has done her day’s work, fetching water for bathing her three children and cooking and cleaning their food and dishes. She doesn’t check her steps on her phone.

I have another habit in honor of Surdna with water. It doesn’t make us ethically or environmentally even. Instead, it notices her, as I notice myself.

I use all the water I can find and walk around my house ceremoniously watering the plants or filling up the cistern. I am obsessed and anal about this matter. I call these little walks pilgrimages. They go out to the cistern in the garden or they go to the living room or the front porch. Pasta water. Half full water glasses. Drops that drop in a bucket, far away, as thoughts and prayers, not action. I also pick up stray water bottles on the street, hand-sanitize and add their orphaned water to my various pots.

This Spring, in the North Atlantic, not a single newborn white whale has been spotted: The water is too warm; the mothers have birthed no calves. The sea is all around us. It is our home. And the last calf…