Water From the Well

It’s been a while since I posted to this blog and I have to wonder why. I think it’s because winter has forced us indoors and to introspection. Apart from endless hours of television, there’s not much to observe in my living room. And do you know something, the longer I’m here, the more it all starts to make sense. Well, except for this:

Water from the well…
So much for the advances of civilisation. A large part of my grocery store efforts go in to purchasing water. Clean, bottled drinking water. Now I thought one of the advantages of an advanced society was the provision of clean water into the home. There are indeed taps in our apartment and they do provide water. It looks clean (except for the time they were doing maintenance works on the underground system), it doesn’t smell terribly bad, but it tastes acrid and bitter and not at all like clean water ought to taste. So it’s a case of turn back the clock and provide your own water supply. Now we can hardly dig a well in mid-air on the balcony (that’s the equivalent of our backyard) and it may not be any cleaner than what’s already coming out of our tap, so we resort to the next most obvious thing in a consumer society – we buy it. We travel twenty minutes to the warehouse, push through the crowds to get a ‘cart’ (trolley, in Antipodean), lift and load boxes of plastic containers filled with fresh (!) clean water, pay the cashier, lift them into the car, travel twenty minutes home again, get another different style of ‘cart’ (provided by the apartment’s management), lift the boxes out of the car, transport them upstairs, and store them in the cupboard. (The water is also harsh on skin when bathing, but we put up with that and purchase a couple of gallons of skin lotion while we’re at the store). This is the modern world we live in. No longer must I ‘cart’ water from the well, these days I ‘cart’ it from the store. At least I’m still doing better than those less fortunate women who have to carry water vessels on their heads across rough, unpaved terrain - I've got wheels to help, but it doesn’t look to me like we’re so far ahead of the game.