It Ain't Just a Metaphor

This may come as a shock to you, as it did to me: the term "dry well" actually refers to something in the real world.

It's not just a dismissive way to talk of someone who doesn't have the emotional wherewithal to be intimate.

It's not just a description for your creativity when it needs time to meander and stare out the window instead of produce actual creative-ness.

There's a concrete thing to which that metaphor refers, and that, my friends, is what we have here today.

We do NOT have a failure to communicate between pump and well and cistern.

We have, essentially, a dry well.

A state of affairs I have fretted over and anticipated for oh, two or three years.

It's a dry year. The lake levels are lower than any other year that anyone around here remembers. The birch leaves, which are yellow and falling, are actually dry. These all should have been my clues.

After our eleven days' worth of company left, I blithely waited for the cistern to fill, which it did, and then started in on laundry. Yesterday the cistern had fallen below the spot where it normally asks for water and the well wasn't delivering, but we've had that problem already this summer, and it turned out to be the pump. So surely it was the pump again. Right?

Uh.

We opened the well cap and performed the Pebble Test. You would know this as "dropping a rock down the pipe." It fell and fell and bounced off the sides of things and eventually plunked.

I've worried about this before. And now, apparently, it has come to pass.

I'm feeling all "Laura and Mary" except that we have it better than they did. We already drink "town water," which we keep in attractive (?) blue jugs on our kitchen counter. We put that into the cistern and every time we go to town will fill up with another 19 liters to add. We could have a man with a water truck come bring us water, but we're not quite ready for that.

We are flushing toilets with the accumulated rainwater. This whole situation may also get me back to my health club, where I understand there's a shower. Of course I'd be too embarrassed to shower only so I'd have to work out, too, and that would be a good thing.

We are actually fine, in the sense that there's a lake in front of us and we have access to potable water.

But we could use some rain. Normal amounts. I wish Pakistan could send us some of their water. They probably do, too.