songofsuburbia

There’s never much to do during these early summer days. I, being my typically laissez-faire self when it comes to job searches, have yet to locate steady seasonal employment. So, in the interim, my parents are more than willing to put me to work on household tasks. The fact is, I’d probably be doing them anyway, whether I had something better to do or not, but they certainly help tick away the day.

I mowed the lawn, one of my perennial duties around the old homestead, in addition to snipping up and bagging some freshly liberated tree branches.

My final task was hosing off the deck, in an attempt to rid it of the odiously persistent seed pods that descend onto it from a nearby shade tree and a winter’s worth of shmutzy buildup.

The deck cleansing proved to be a relaxing, even cathartic task. It was a nice way to welcome in the summer, the first time I realized that a season of warm weather and cool water were here to stay, at least for a few months.

As gallons and gallons of water spewed forth through the hose’s spray nozzle, something dawned on me.

I live in a place where it is completely acceptable to use water to do something as trivial as clean off a slightly grimy deck surface. I also live in a place where water is routinely used as a means to brighten up dirty cars, rinse barely soiled clothes and provide public spaces with a certain festive, decorative aura.

Then I thought of all the places in the world where water is a valuable commodity, where individuals go months or years without seeing a volume of water as large as the one I used to clean my deck or wash my twice-worn jeans.

This fact will never occur to most people living in the insulated, isolated sphere of suburbia, separated by wall, fence, airlock, border, ocean, mountain and desert from the tortures and travails of the developing, resource starved world all around us. Most citizens of my town aren’t greatly bothered by this fact, as is evidenced by their habitual infringement of the town’s lawn watering regulations. It is a thought that does not keep them awake nights, nor does it give them pause while they spray off their backyard patio.

So I thought of the people living in those places who would drop dead at the sight of so much water in one location. I thought of how wasteful it is. I thought of the kind of privileged, wealthy, randomly fortunate individual I am. I thought of water conservation and energy consumption and food production and disease eradication. I thought of people dying from thirst and water-borne disease in Darfur. I thought of taking my hose over there and giving them some relief, a fresh blast of purified, filtered, fluoride-enriched suburban water. I thought of stopping everything to make a difference.

And I kept on spraying.

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