Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [235]

That’s all there has been for six years. I can remember the rain six years ago, water swirling around the back porch, not high enough to come into the house, but high enough to attract my brothers who wanted to play in it. Cory, forever worried about infection, wouldn’t let them. She said they’d be splashing around in a soup of all the waste-water germs we’d been watering our gardens with for years. Maybe she was right, but kids all over the neighborhood covered themselves with mud and earthworms that day, and nothing terrible happened to them. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 235

Note

The drought is made sensory through a remembered exception: water high enough to tempt, but not to flood. The ‘soup of all the waste-water germs’ fuses domestic scarcity (reused garden water) with maternal dread, and the closing clause quietly lets the children win — the anecdote’s point is pleasure surviving precaution.