"Also true."
She looked out the window of the car for a while, at the snow going by on the shoulder of the highway.
"We waste like two gallons every time somebody waits for the shower to get hot," she said. "I timed it."
That's how it started. We started the week after the hearing, with the restrictions still in place, and in March, when the district eased off from Stage 2 to Stage 1, we kept going. We keep a bucket in the shower, the orange one the district gave us, and whoever showers first in the morning stands it under the tap while the water runs cold, and carries it out to the garage. By the end of the week, there'd be four or five buckets of it lined up in the garage. On Saturday mornings, Pia and I carry them out across the gravel, over the low cedar fence, where Fidel showed us a place a person can step over without breaking anything, and out across the dead brown bluegrass to the maple. We pour them out in a slow circle at the drip line, the way Octave said Georgine used to, about three feet out from the trunk, never right at the base. Deep and slow and not too often. That part we learned from a pamphlet the county extension office puts out about saving stressed trees. We could have learned it from Georgine, but she's not allowed near us, and I don't think she'd come if she were. Prue told me the board had no objection to what we were doing, as long as we didn't bring a hose. I think the board was relieved somebody was doing it.
She does walk by, though. Not every week. Some Saturdays around eight, while we're out there, a small woman in a fleece vest and a straw hat comes down the far side of Piñon Draw Boulevard, across four lanes and a median from us, walking slowly with a cane she didn't need last summer. She doesn't stop. She doesn't wave. She doesn't cross. But she slows down when she's opposite the tree, and she looks at it for as long as it takes her to walk past, and then she looks at the buckets, and then she keeps going. The first time it happened, Pia saw her before I did, and put her bucket down on the grass, and stood up straight and watched her until she was gone, and didn't say anything.
The second time, Pia lifted her hand.