COLLECTING HAIL

“Girls, I need to tell you something.” Heather interrupted her daughters’ play. Upon hearing the serious tone of their mother’s voice, they dropped their blocks and sat on either side of her on the sofa.

“Where does water come from?” Heather asked.

“From the tap!”

“That’s what I need to talk to you about. The water from the tap comes from a big dam. The dam gets filled in from water from different rivers. The rivers get their water from underneath the earth. The water underneath the earth is from rain that seeps down.”

They stared at her with their big child-doe eyes.

“Can you remember the last time it rained?”

The girls looked at each other. Then they shook their heads.

“It’s not raining right now. There is still water in the dam, but not a lot. And the farmers, who grow all our food, their dams have dried up already.”

“Are we going to run out of water, Mommy?”

“Maybe. But we’re going to try our best to not waste water so that we can prevent that from happening. You’re going to help me, aren’t you?”

And so the girls stopped leaving the tap open while they brushed their teeth, and they collected their old bathwater for the plants outside.

A few weeks later, it rained.

It not only rained, it stormed.

It not only stormed, it hailed. Big chunks of ice, thrown down unto the parched ground.

After the storm, the girls grabbed two buckets and started collecting the ice.

“What are you doing?” Heather asked them.

“We’re collecting the ice. The ice will melt into water. And then we can send the water to the farmers!”

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