My editorial last week was about water and how we can’t take it for granted that this rainy place will always have enough.

It’s not that the Pacific Northwest is expected to dry out as the planet warms up — in fact, scientists including UW’s iconoclastic weather expert Cliff Mass predict it may even get a bit wetter here as the century rolls on. But it’s reasonable to expect that many more people will settle here in coming decades to escape constant water struggles in places including California. Now is the time — as Ilwaco is doing — to protect watersheds for future generations.

My maternal grandparents are always in mind and, oddly enough, water management is one reason why. The groundwater at their farm included just enough oil and gas to make it unpalatable — though not enough to make it valuable. So they had a cistern under their little stucco house that stored a few thousand gallons hauled from the fire station in town every several weeks in a big galvanized tank in the back of Grandpa’s pickup. When I was a boy, there was an iron hand pump in their kitchen that had to be vigorously pumped to levitate water from the mossy tank below. The whole system entailed lots of labor.

Once when visiting, I had a glass of milk and then washed the glass out before having a little water. Without being anything other than good humored, my grandparents gently inquired whether I thought having a little milk mixed with my water would hurt my health. Wasting the teaspoon or two of milk in my glass, plus the water to wash it down the drain, was fundamentally contrary to their way of life.

Without being obsessive/compulsive, this lesson in frugality still reverberates. I’m as wasteful as the next guy, but my wife never ceases to be amused by my habit of reusing gently soiled paper towels. As least I’m not to the level of Grandpa’s little sister Lillian. She dried and reused them until they disintegrated. (Her economical habits played a role in her and Granduncle Jim having money to amass one of the nation’s great abstract art collections.)

Embedded in such practices is a feeling of respect for our world. It isn’t disposable.

You’ll read in this coming Chinook Observer about hard times facing Pacific County government. For reasons we’ll explain, years of belt tightening lie ahead. Thanks to some precautionary savings, the initial bumps won’t be as bad as they might have been, but I don’t think I’d want to be a county commissioner right now.

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