Water, Water Everywhere … And Counting On It

Yesterday afternoon, we developed a leak in the line that brings water back to our house from the main out on the road. What a headache!

Call a guy with a back hoe, dig a big hole in the middle of our gravel driveway, locate the crack in the pipe, fill every available bucket then shut off all the water and call a plumber, repair the pipe, fill in the hole … Ugh! Big hassle, big expense, and who knows how much water we’ve been wasting.

But it reminded me of the time, some years ago, when we rented a lovely little cottage for a week in charming French village — aren’t they all? — a few miles south of Falaise in Normandy. The owner of the property met us there and showed us through the place.

During the orientation, Madame asked us not to use too much water because, she said, her water bill was computed by the liter.

I remember it struck me at the time that, by contrast, the minimum unit used to compute our water bill is a thousand gallons.

Seems to me that’s a wonderful little example of how differently we in America think about and treat our natural resources compared to the rest of the world.