An exercise from Old Friend From Far Away by Natalie Goldberg.
Tell me what you will miss when you die.
I don’t get homesick. I left my parents, my brother and the house I grew up in almost five years ago. I don’t cry. I don’t yearn to go back more than once a year, at most, or call them as often as I should. But there are things I miss.
The drinking water. Our water supply comes from a well just outside the town, and we have a special tap to filter it just for drinking. For more than ten years that water has found a home in a glass jug in the refrigerator, a jug all my friends would tell you makes it too cold, condensation coating the glass. But the water is perfect–well worth the temperature and straws for my sensitive teeth. The only comparable taste I’ve experienced was the cascading glacier water that filled my hands on my eighth grade field trip.
The glass jug is tall and narrow and too small to hold enough daily water for four, and I’ll often find it sitting on the counter empty, the last recipient (undoubtedly my father or brother) too lazy to refill it. After all these years, now just a visitor in that house, this still frustrates me, but I remove the cracked white lid and place that jug in the sink, lift the lever on the drinking tap, and wait. The tap is long and very narrow, like a heavy-duty extension cord, and it takes a minute to fill the jug. Imagine, then, the wait and frustration when my mother–well-intentioned as she is–insists on depleting the water pressure to fill an entire spaghetti pot, in fear that the regular tap water is still contaminated from the advisory seven years back, and that in this unlikely event, the rolling boil will fail to kill the bacteria before she cooks the noodles, removes them from the pot, and sends perfectly good drinking water funneling down the drain. But I stand by the tap and wait anyway–the water stream limp as a ribbon–as it cascades into the jug.
When I die, I imagine I’ll miss that water–the taste, the memory. Almost as much as I’ll miss the empty jug, the pot, the liquid pirouetting down the sink.
