Fresh From The Source

Barley, a dog, pauses to drink from a broad, shallow stream of water flowing down a sidewalk from a broken sprinkler head at the edge of a patch of grass.

I try to avoid letting Barley drink from standing pools of water, mostly out of an abundance of caution. I recognize that, if some fresh rainwater gathers on a shady, sleepy sidewalk, there’s probably not much harm in Barley wetting her whistle, but my prior experiences of living in urban environments makes it hard for me to shake the memory of such pools being rainbow-slick with visible films of motor oil. In this particular instance, the day was hot, a sprinkler head had broken, and water was bubbling forth in real time as if from a natural spring, so I relaxed my ordinary paranoia and let her shed some heat with an infusion of delicious Underwater Cool.