The Little Things

One of the downsides of our cool lakeside home is that we have weird tap water I don’t like. By weird I mean it’s salty, and by “don’t like” I mean revile. It tastes semi normal at first, and then the aftertaste is a bit like you just bathed in a tub of Epsom salts. (No really, come visit!) We get reports from the county saying it’s healthy and all, but it’s the taste. The taste.

We tried different things. We had a cool refrigerator filter set up. I bought some other thingy featured in Dwell, which meant it had to be amazing. It was not. And so, for a very, very long time we bought our bottles of water.

The problem with this tactic was that I subscribe to the school of thinking that you should drown your body in water each day (otherwise known as “drink 8 glasses”), meaning we were going through tons of bottles. Tons. We had to go to the grocery store with mules to bring it all home. I get tired just thinking about it.

We knew there was a simple solution. But, alas, we rejected it.

Every day, we saw the truck come into our neighborhood delivering huge jugs of water to all our neighbors. The people smiled. They drank their non-foul tasting water and smiled wider.

My husband, aesthetic architect he is, said that the visions of water coolers a la The Office made him break out in hives. I agreed. Our kitchen is not a cubicle, I said. I shunned the jugs.

And so we continued with the mules and the lugging and the not having space in our fridge because we had too many water bottles that had to stay cool in the sweltering heat.

Until I gave in. I caved like the best of them. Sick of looking at a to-do list item on my to-do list that said “fix water” and not being able to scratch it off. Sick of spending mental energy dealing with something that I wanted to be awesome and automatic.

So I called the jug company who had come to our house when we first moved in to ask if we wanted water and finally said yes. We were ready. Two years later, we were in.

Now, we have lovely tasting water. The man comes every Wednesday and gives us three big jugs. He also – as a huge boon – delivers our soda water these days also (I love me some soda water and lime at all hours of the day). It’s fantastic. We even found a place for the whole jug apparatus that hides it from my husband’s judge-y eyes.

It’s all so darn fantastic I’ve been regularly writing about it in my gratitude journal for weeks now.

And it was all so spectacularly easy.

We’ve all heard the phrase, “What we resists persists.” For me, water was a thing that bothered me every day. EVERY DAY. I thought about it. A lot. (More than one should think about these things.) And I managed to pass two years of my life with a less than ideal water solution because I was unable to face the reality of what was right in front of me. I deeply resisted the simple solution because of not-very-thoroughly-explored aesthetic fears.

And then, when I finally accepted that this simple solution (read: buy the ugly jugs) would solve our problem, an answer to the aesthetic issue also immediately appeared.

These days I think, “We were CRAZY for waiting two years to get this system.” Because we were.

We all have stuff like this in our lives. Stuff we don’t want to accept, stuff that we push and shove and resist against, stuff that keeps us in a state of non-bliss.

For me, one of those things was the water.

What’s one of yours?