The Water Collector

Sam Aquinas stepped out onto his front porch and noted that the shadows were rich and deep under a brilliant early morning sun. A gentle breeze blew with a warmth that hinted of summer, but with a chill that let one know summer was not quite here. Sam had some business to attend to in town today and thought he would enjoy the two-mile walk up the gently sloping hill that would take him there. He would most likely catch a ride home with a friend when he was ready to return.

Sam walked the hundred yards from his porch out to the roadway, then turned and headed into town. As he crossed the Wet River bridge, he stopped for a moment, peering down at the gently gurgling water below. He chuckled to himself at the audacity of calling this a river. It did run for a couple of hundred miles, but its average width was about two feet and its average depth about the same.

The water was interesting to Sam because he was a water collector. For more than forty years, he had collected water samples from various bodies of water throughout the country and even some from foreign lands. The library shelves in his den were filled, not with books, but with a few hundred neatly-labeled jars containing Sam's water collection. Each label indicated the date and place of collection of the sample contained in the jar to which the label was affixed.

Actually, many of the jars contained no more than a hint of the water that had once been there, since the jars had not been sealed tightly enough to prevent evaporation. In those jars still holding water, the clarity varied from crystalline to muddy opaque. The display was interesting enough so that occasionally a stranger would pull into Sam's place and ask to see his water museum, having heard about it through some distant friend or relative.

Sam resumed his trip into town, and first stopped at the OK Pain Clinic. He had for several weeks now been undergoing accupuncher treatments. When he had first heard about these treatments, he thought they had something to do with a Chinese doctor sticking long thin needles into various places on one's body and twisting the needles slowly back and forth.