An Earth Day reminder

With most places having Earth Day celebrations over the weekend, I lost track of the fact that today, April 22, is officially Earth Day.

As perhaps a little reminder from the universe to not take natural resources for granted, I turned on the kitchen faucet this afternoon to just a tiny little trickle of water that quickly faded to nothing.

With dinnertime fast approaching, I grabbed some leftover bean cooking liquid to cook the lentils and set to chopping veggies.  Over the next hour, I probably attempted to use the sink no less than ten times — to wash hands, rinse off a dish — you name it, it felt like every time I turned around I needed water for something, and I just couldn’t get it through my head that turning the faucet was not going to yield water.

I’ve had this same experience when we’ve had power outages — go into a room and flip a light switch, just expecting the light to turn on as usual, but, nothing.

Clean, running water, power at the flip of a switch — so many things that I take for granted on a daily basis . . . .

Ironically enough, we ended up buying bottled water on Earth Day.  My MIL swung by the store and grabbed a few gallons for us on her way to drop off Gabriel.

With no warning on the outage or obvious cause, I was prepared to be without running water until morning at least.  Instead, it felt like no sooner had I popped the top on the gallon of water and poured glasses for dinner, whoosh, we had water from the tap again!

It’s hard when we live in a country that has seemingly plentiful resources, but every now and then, we are reminded to be grateful, and, perhaps, to renew our attempts to use those resources carefully, in a manner that sustains the planet we all share.