Outside our New York house today everything I see is covered in water.  Hard, white water.  Snow.

But outside our Los Angeles house –  our tenant tells us – a dusting of ash, fine, almost invisible ash, covers  everything.  Because of the fires, because of the drought.   Governor Brown has declared a water emergency.

Decades ago, I lived in Italy during a water shortage.  From Rome on South, it hadn’t rained for months.  In some villages, women lined up at the fountain with a bucket, as they had in ages past.  Municipalities turned off the water for hours every day.  No water at home, a trickle at the public trough.

But not in Rome.  Newspapers reported the shortage but no one seemed to care: it was summertime, the tourists were thick on the ground, making the rounds of the gushing fountains of Rome… and sooner or later it was bound to rain.  I saw a fellow wash his car on the street, using a public tap.  He was beside the newsstand where the posted daily headline implored: Conservate Acqua!  I called a friend at Il Messaggero, told him about the guy washing his car unaware of the drought.  I wanted to suggest a humorous approach, a save water campaign like the one we’d had in New York a year or two earlier.  Posters had gone up in New York urging “Save Water – Shower with a Friend!”  “Don’t wash your car, bathe your baby!”  And similar fun stuff.

My journalist friend told me:

“It’s hopeless.  He knows there’s a water shortage, but his car comes first.  The portiere here at Il Messaggero just bought a new car – he parked it in the piazza outside.  He’s been out to look at it five times this morning, walking around it, caressing it…I see him from my office…are you going to tell him to save water by not washing his car?  It’ll never happen… And besides, it’ll rain.”

The Italians have seen many dry years since that summer of insouciance.  This white New York winter, this abundance of waterfall, doesn’t mean water will always be here for the wasting.  Next time I go to Los Angeles, I’ll run my hand over the table on the terrace and blow ash from my fingers.  The lawn will be brown.

Alice Campbell Romano, January 22, 2014

At 17, Alice was a finalist in an Atlantic Monthly poetry competition.  After a decent college interval, Alice ran away to Rome where she became a respected translator and script doctor.  Sharpening dialog, she says, is good training for a poet.  She is working on a novel now, inspired by collaboration with her husband on a screenplay about old friends rediscovering love in Italy.