It’s been an especially hot, dry summer here in our wee corner of Northland, with no real rain since late in 2019. The vegetable garden, aside from a few lonely, overripe tomatoes drooping from a couple of withered stems, is essentially dead, and the leaves on the azaleas have turned a mottled shade of brown that I’ve never seen in the seven years we’ve lived here.

We live in the country, so the only domestic water supply we have available is the stuff that’s fallen out of the sky onto our roof. As a result, my favourite pastime over the past few weeks has been climbing on top of the water tank to inspect the water level inside.

It costs approximately $450 to get half a tank load of water delivered from town on the back of a truck, and my wife and I see it as a matter of personal pride that we not allow this to happen. So, we’ve implemented rigorous water conservation measures. These include, in no particular order: washing our clothes and our children at the in-laws house in town; a strict if it’s yellow let it mellow policy with the toilet (and then when it becomes necessary to flush the brown down, bucketing water from the small tank that is fed from the garage roof to fill the cistern); and ceasing to clean our cars (this was easy for me since I never washed mine in the first place).

I’ve even taken to showering at work, which is no small sacrifice, as the men’s bathroom there is a strange and disconcerting place. Although it received a new paint job a couple of years ago (a particularly unsettling shade of baby blue), the ledge above the shower stall is a graveyard of empty bottles of shampoo and conditioner which have potentially been there for decades.

The door to the stall is hinged in such a way that you have to contort your body just to get inside it (or maybe I’m just fat), and there’s only one single hook for hanging your clothes and towel on. Leaving them on a pile on the floor isn’t an option, because the doorway into the shower is screened by a mouldy plastic curtain which doesn’t quite do what it’s supposed to, so by the end of your shower there’s an inch of water pooling on the floor outside the cubicle.

Things don’t get any better once you’re in the cubicle itself. I’m six-foot-four (or at least that’s what I tell people), and the ancient shower rose is conveniently located at a height just north of my navel. Even so, there’s always at least one half-blocked jet that shoots upwards at just the right angle to hit me in the eye. Furthermore, for some reason there’s rarely any hot water, and even when there is, it has a nasty habit of disappearing at the most inconvenient times (I’ll spare you the details).

To be fair, there has been a smidgeon of the wet stuff falling from the heavens in the last week or two, but while our friends who live five kilometres down the road have been plastering pictures of the downpours at their house all over Facebook, all we’ve had at ours is the occasional short-lived, misty kiss, as though we’ve strayed too close to someone with the habit of ‘spraying it’ rather than ‘saying it’. So far, no amount of naked shamanic rain dancing has convinced the sky to perform otherwise, and it remains touch and go as to whether we’ll have to forfeit that 450 bucks for a tanker delivery.

Hopefully, the heavens will open up soon and we can go back to washing ourselves, our children and our clothes in the comfort of our own home. I suppose the one good thing about waiting for the rain is that we learn not to take such a precious resource for granted. 

Do you have any handy tips on saving water? Let me know in the comments.

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