Each member of our family knew to live by the motto “conserve and preserve,” and I figured it was a rule in every household.
My memory holds one particular morning in which the sun seemed especially hot and brutal. My oldest sister had a friend spend the night, and since our house only had one bathroom, we knew to make things quick when going behind that closed door. This friend did not.
“That shower seems a bit excessive,” my mom mentioned. My sister just shrugged her shoulders.
After another five minutes or so went by, I felt fidgety. I never wanted anyone to get in trouble and especially not my sister’s friend whom I adored. She was practically of movie star status to me — cute as a button, always offering a kind smile even for me, the annoying littlest sister.
Luckily, this sweet girl finally appeared, her hair wrapped in a towel. She smelled like roses as she passed by, and all I could feel was incredible relief that no one said, “You just about ran the well dry!” even though I clearly knew at least one of us was thinking it.
Dad sometimes reminded us that the unbearably hot drought of summer meant that even more than a typical day we needed to conserve and preserve water as a valuable resource.
“We share a well with the pigs in the farrowing barn and with the feeder steers in the far barn,” Dad would explain. The dairy barn was up the road and ran on its own water well.
I remember asking him, “How much water is in the well?,” feeling certain I would get a very specific answer. I did not. “There isn’t a way of measuring it,” was the answer.
A couple of days later, I asked my sister who had all the answers to everything, every time. She also answered, “There is no way to know that, silly.”
Such puzzled feelings bounced around in my head. While I brushed my teeth, I knew to turn the water off. When I turned the spigot on to fill the stock tank for the steers, I found myself hoping that water appeared as always. What would happen if one day we lifted the hard-cranking handle to the water at the front of the hog barn and nothing came out? Would I be the one in trouble?
It weighed heavily, enough that I interrupted David Brinkley and Chet Huntley one night to ask my dad these agonizing questions. He held up his index finger until Chet finished a point and my favorite commercial for chewing gum came on.
“I don’t want you losing sleep over this,” I can remember Dad saying. “But I am glad you grasp the importance of water. Just don’t ever waste it, and don’t ever let the stock tank run over,” he said.
That last one was a big one, and it stung more than just a little bit.
I had been known to turn on the hose and go ride my bike around in circles and then skip some stones across the surface of the hog wallow and then get on the swing, pumping my legs to go fast and high enough to touch the big branch of the maple tree.
Uh-oh. There was now a small river running from the feedlot, that precious water wasted for absolutely nothing good. I carried my shame with silence, hoping against hope no one would ever notice, and no one would yell at me.
With three older sisters, I’ll let you guess how that turned out. Let me just say, conserve and preserve was a motto that emblazoned itself onto my conscience long before it became widely embraced by our larger world. I carry it with me, still.
