water Archives - David Mark Brown

Now that the season for wasting water has passed here in Texas, it’s time to consider drinking it. Crazy, I know. I too used to poo-poo, or pee-pee (as it were) water drinkage. H20 comes in handy for brushing the old teeth every couple of days or so, but drinking? Isn’t there enough water in sweet tea?

Heck, I drink wine practically every night, and that’s brimming with water. That’s what I used to think, until I mentioned my aching and tight muscles to our midwife on a lark. (Midwifery, is there anything they don’t know?) She asked me how much water I drank in a day. “In a day?” was my response. Then I sputtered,

Read moreWater: Not Just for Wasting

Urine_in_a_toilet — Urine in toilet by David Shankbone

I lay awake at night as the temperature drops. With each drip of the faucet I feel hours of conservation go down the drain. It’s as if the granola me never happened. I’ve been erased.”

Attending university in Montana, a fellow dorm mate reamed me for leaving the faucet running while shaving. The horror! To my defense, I grew up in Texas and had never heard of concepts such as conservation and recycling. RE-cycling sounded like some old fogies’ biker club.

But the habit was easy enough to develop. I had learned how to turn the water on by my freshman year, how much harder could it be to turn it on and off a couple dozen times in quick succession while rinsing my razor? I even experimented (hey, it was college) with dipping my razor in standing water to test whether it used less water. (It turns out the water seeps around the drain plug.) Hell, I’ve become a “yellow, let it mellow” guy in the years since college (and not just in public restrooms).