The Water Bearer's Tale

 

by Pa Rock

Tired Old Typist

This has been the first summer since I've lived here in southern Missouri (8 years) that I have not been sweat-bonded to the seat of my riding lawn mower.   I usually mow every two weeks in the summer, a process that takes about six hours,  but it has now been over six weeks since my last mowing session, and the lawn is still not in need of a trim.  It is, in fact, brown and crunchy.  The Ozarks is in the middle of a severe drought, the worst that I have experienced in my seventy-four years.

So the lawnmower and I have parted company, at least for the time being.  But as Gilda Radner used to say, "It's always something."   Now that I am not mowing every two weeks, my time is much more strenuously occupied with carrying water to all of my yard plants.  I have two dozen outdoor flowers in pots, seven rose bushes, seven small trees, and two small garden plots that all need water every day.  And to make sure that every one of those plants gets enough to drink each day, I dutifully carry water directly to them in gallon jugs.

I water all of the potted plants, one of the rosebushes, and the sweet potato patch every morning, a process that puts about 1,200 steps on the old pedometer and takes half-an-hour.  (Every sweet potato in the patch gets an individual drink right at its base.).   Everything gets a drink in the evening,  a routine that takes roughly 2,400 steps and an hour-and-a-half of hard labor in the grueling heat.  When I finally get back into the house just before dark I am beaten down and almost too tired for supper, and I know that as soon as I crawl into bed I will be waking to a new day, getting dressed in the dark, and begin filling the water jugs for the morning watering session again.   

Aquarius is the water-carrier, the mystical healer who bestows water, or life, upon the land - yet here I am, an Aries, born to lead but instead treading the parched landscape making sure that every green plant that I stuck into this earth has the sustenance to survive.  Maybe that is some form of leadership, but it certainly has the feel of forced servitude.

Perhaps some day not too remote I will trade in all of this green and brown vastness for a small concrete cubicle in a large concrete maze of concrete cubicles and never have to worry about mowing or watering again.  

But somehow that doesn't sound perfect either.

(Memo to Senator Joe Manchin:  Climate change is real, and it is already happening.  Your irresponsibility and greed are dooming the entire planet and impairing the lives of millions, including your own grandchildren.  May you live long enough to reap some of the destruction and desolation that you have sown.)