The catalyst for my latest revelation about my mother has been the drought. For just as our water levels have dwindled to all-time lows uncovering the dry, cracked lines of riverbeds, the drought also has stripped away a portion of my mom’s character, exposing what I like to refer to as her “Water Warden” side.

It’s a side I’m fairly confident my family has never seen before.

It’s not that I ever thought my mom was wasteful. She recycles. She has a high-efficiency washer and dryer. She is conscientious about energy and fuel conservation. She’s creative with leftovers.

But she leads in quiet ways. You won’t find her pontificating about global warming or greenhouse gases. She doesn’t compost. She feels bad about utilizing paper and plastic bags at the grocery store but does it anyway because she never seems to have her arsenal of canvas bags with her. Her car doesn’t have any bumper stickers on it, let alone any that would advocate saving the whales or the sea turtles or the polar ice caps.

In short, she’s conscientious but doesn’t run down the street in sandals fashioned from egg crates, hugging every tree she comes across.

Morticia mommy
You can imagine my surprise, then, when she let everything in our yard go: flowers, ornamental trees, garden beds and a few finicky shrubs – all dead. The lawn fought valiantly for a few dry weeks before withering into a landscape of crumbly dirt patches dotted with scraggly, yellowed spikes of dead grass.

“We’re still allowed to water our plants, Mom,” I said.

“We’re in a drought, Regan,” she replied.

We stood staring at the front yard as if we were two early settlers in the American West. I half expected to see bleached cattle skulls in our flower beds with tumbleweed rolling past.

My mom’s staunch stance really impressed me. It comes from a woman who, like me, can’t stand not to have color around. She starts to mope when the seasons change and she doesn’t have time to change out the fading flower beds fast enough. More than anything, her Morticia Adams approach to our yard truly brought home (literally) how serious the drought is.

Rage against rain gauge
But Mom’s water-watching extends beyond just our yard or my own family’s water consumption. The longer the drought, the more indignant she becomes. Neighbors crank up the hose to water some newly planted trees, conveniently letting the spray linger across the lawn for extended periods, and she starts pacing behind our house’s front windows where she keeps watch as Water Warden.

“The nerve!” she shouts. Her words become strangled with anger. All that emerges are low guttural growls of key terms: “Drought … idiot! Arrogance! Conserve … water … impact!”

She has stopped short of saying anything about water use inside the house, although I’ve noticed she only runs the dishwasher when it’s crammed to the hilt. My dad, who suffers from arthritis, suggested one evening that he was thinking of using their bathroom whirlpool tub. “We can’t justify that in this drought,” was all Mom replied. I keep waiting for a Victorian-era basin and pitcher to quietly appear in my bathroom, implying that I limit my water intake while brushing my teeth.

But generally speaking, she keeps to herself – doing her part by letting her lawn and plants die in quiet repose, a silent testament to what we all should be practicing in light of imminent Stage IV water restrictions.

Thus, when it finally started raining last week, I quietly started building an ark while Mom hummed and smiled. I thought that, given the brief 48-hour bout of rain, Mom would finally break down and buy a pansy or two, maybe a mum for the front door. Instead, I found her hunched over a small plastic storage container in the driveway. She seemed surprised to see me, starting before saying, “Seems we’ve gotten a good, solid inch of rain!” She could hardly contain her excitement.

Meteorologist in the making
I had no idea my mother was ardently following in the windblown footsteps of famed meteorologist Jim Cantore, creating homemade rain gauges in our driveway out of discarded Rubbermaid containers. When pressed, she simply shrugged. “I want to know how much rain we’ve gotten,” she said.

She returned to her new catchphrase. “We’re in a drought, Regan,” she said, as if this statement alone offered enough punctuation to close the conversation entirely. A day later I would discover at least one other makeshift rain gauge. Turns out Mom has one for daily rainfall and one for total rainfall over extended periods.

Now that it has stopped raining, she has turned sullen again. Her plastic bins have run dry and no longer bring joy. For the first time, I’m afraid to string up my usual sets of orange, purple and blinking eyeball Halloween lights for fear that our bushes (whose branches have been reduced to crackling tinder) will ignite in little fireballs that my mom won’t want to waste water putting out. On the upside, this year has been better than ever for fake cobwebs, a finicky substance that looks even more realistic when caught on the brittle, slumped heads of dead flowers and the needle-less remains of potted ornamental evergreens (an ironic name). It’s good we’re heading into winter when a dry, dead yard is expected. I worry about Thanksgiving though. Nothing says bountiful harvest like empty planters on the front stoop and flower beds full of cobwebs.

But Mama White, Water Warden, will persist. I welcome Stage IV water restrictions with open arms, if only so that we’ll all be on more equal, frugal footing.

Until then my mother waits, rain gauges in hand, with one eye turned toward the heavens and the other watching everyone else’s water consumption.