rockinlibrarian | "At Least I Have Water"

Yeah, I know I haven't posted here in a long while. You been reading me over at GeekMom? But I was about to tweet something that would have turned into a long tweet thread and I was like, okay, easier to do this way, in these surprise extra fifteen minutes I've got.

--I arrived at my first outreach preschool of the day to find it shut down from a water break problem. "Awww," I said, for the missing storytime, but it hit me that I feel particularly badly about water problems.

I always think of the time in high school when Angie had been having a really bad day and it hadn't even started yet-- she joined me and a few other people at my locker first thing in the morning. I was already in the middle of telling everyone how, that morning, our cousins had a problem with their well, and they'd had to come out to our house to brush teeth, shower, whatever else to get ready for school that morning. And Angie got this look of pure epiphany and said out loud, "Oh! At least I have water!"

And it became kind of a gratitude mantra. She'd keep a gratitude journal, and on the days she couldn't think of anything else to be grateful for, she'd write, "At least I have water." I do recall there were some days she just wrote "I have water" three times.

So, although I always think of it as ANGIE'S mantra, it became mine, too. And when people DON'T have water-- when you see the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, continue to be unresolved, let alone around the world in less developed countries-- it's like OUCH. How can anything be worse? When you can't even say "At least I have water"?

So that's my shout-out to the importance and wonder of clean potable water today. Have a nice day! Be glad you have water! Unless you don't, then I hope you find some soon! Maybe somebody who DOES have water can help out, eh?