Thirty-eight percent

A leaky shower, a vanishing lake and digging deep to find the well.

All anyone can talk about around here is water.

“Did you get any rain last week?”

“Can you believe this heat?”

“Stay cool out there.”

After more than two months without a drop from the sky, the Austin area had a few brief scattered storms in the past week, but it hasn’t changed the forecast. Or our outlook.

“It’s our winter,” I tell my friends up north who offer their condolences. “We just stay inside all day. Reverse cabin fever.”

But the truth is that we can’t stay inside all day. Kids trudge back and forth to school on sweltering buses. Delivery drivers pop in and out of their trucks, dropping off packages from one air-conditioned house to the next. Roofers, farmers, landscapers, road workers cover themselves from head to toe to try to survive one day to the next. (And some state politicians wanted to take away their right to water breaks, a law that a judge this week deemed unconstitutional, thankfully. )

Plumbers, as we speak, are sweating under my house to fix a leaky pipe that has wasted untold gallons of water in the past 24 hours.

When the leak started on Wednesday morning, the steady stream of drops piled up almost faster than I could collect them and water the plants that are barely hanging on in our medicine garden.

My thoughts turned to where that water was coming from: Lake Travis and Lake Buchanan, our quickly shrinking reservoirs that provide water not just for the Austin metro area but farmers along the Colorado River, too.

I made the mistake of looking up the levels.