Love in a Time of 4-Methylcyclohexane Methanol

[marmar]

Love in a Time of 4-Methylcyclohexane Methanol

Wednesday, 15 January 2014 09:23
By Krista Bryson, West Virginia Water Crisis | Op-Ed



[font size="1"]Bryson Dowdy, 6, hands a jug to an emergency relief volunteer to be filled with water from a potable water tank in Charleston, West Virginia, January 10, 2014. As federal prosecutors opened an investigation on Friday into a chemical spill in West Virginia that had contaminated drinking water used by more than 200,000 residents, state officials said it remained unclear when tap water would be safe to use. (Photo: Ty William Wright / The New York Times)[/font]


When survival is just another word for heartbreak I will usually make a soup.

There is the act of nourishing, of course, and the comfort of garlic and butter steaming. There’s the wrist swirl required to brown the leeks, and then the bubbling that requires watching. Does the broccoli separate easily when pinned with a wooden spoon? Time is measured by tenderness.

It has been well over a year since Sandy washed me out of my Red Hook home in Brooklyn. The trips to housing court, always in a stiff skirt safety-pinned at the waist, have ceased. The government no longer offers emergency assistance for the costs accrued. Most of the businesses in my old neighborhood are back, their lights twinkling in the winter night, and the tides steadily rise and fall at the shore where they belong. Public housing residents still fight mold and generators prop up their aging infrastructure, but this is the stuff of periodic update in the paper of record, no more than a news item for most people. Many believe the storm has passed.

......(snip)......

Charleston, West Virginia, where a state of emergency and ban on water use has rendered the city nearly silent for six days, is my hometown and only thirty miles southeast from the farm where I was raised. Social media puts me in the bathrooms of family friends with red and fuzzy tap water, of shared press releases that say little but reveal everything. The back-to-the-land strategy of my parents, with their hand-dug wells, protects them in this instance, but only marginally. Their economic and physical well-being is still tied to the capital city, where my mother washes dogs for a living, and where my kid sister attends high school. In the holler they’re safe from the pollution, but not its polluting effects, which will infect every aspect of life in the region in coming weeks. .........................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/21232-love-in-a-time-of-4-methylcyclohexane-methanol