our water

I wasn’t aware that I hadn’t mentioned in a plain and straightforward way how we haven’t had running water in eleven months. In the midst of last winter the well went dry. They dug deeper still nothing. They dug a new sand point - still nothing. So we’ve adapted. His exasperation and outrage shocked me, from this human who has never been here. I said, luckily we live on a river so we can easily bathe in our backyard. This doubled the exasperation. I didn’t tell him that for nearly three years the river has been my preferred bathing spot. It has become a touchstone for me, this tidal body of water whose edges I collapse on who I turn to, with any and all emotion on any and all days. I can depend on this river and its clockwork motions, the way I’ve come to depend on the blooming turning shedding leaves of the alders that line its far bank and their bare naked arms as white in the winter as the rare snow that we get. It’s only then when the surface melds into sheets of ice that we take to bird baths from a pot heated on our wood stove, but even that is not good enough, and still he repeats that I was raised to know better.