Fireside Books: There's exciting news for book lovers. Fireside Books in Parksville now has a second location in Port Alberni. The BookWyrm - used books are just $5 or less. The BookWyrm, on the corner of Redford and Anderson, opens seven days a week from 10 to 5, building your personal library for less. Fireside Books at 464 Island Highway East in Parksville is a book dragon's dream come true. Browse their extensive collections seven days a week. Both locations make growing your personal library easier than ever. New and used books and so much more. Order online at firesidebooks.ca and pick up at either location. Details available online.

The Ballad of Peter & Gracie: Peter and his dog raced here and there, through fields so wide, with dreams in their pockets and stars as their guide. Every day's an adventure under the open sky. In their world of stories, time just flies by.

Peter McCully: It had not rained in 31 days. Peter knew this because his dad had been keeping track on the kitchen calendar, marking each dry day with a small sun in the corner - 31 little suns in a row, marching across the calendar. The lawn had gone from green to yellow to a sort of dusty beige that crunched underfoot.

The garden hose had a crack in it. The bird bath was empty. And Gracie was hot. She lay on the cool tiles of the kitchen floor for most of the afternoon, her white fur puffed out around her, occasionally lifting her head to look at Peter with an expression that clearly said, Do something about this.

"I know," Peter told her. "I know." Vancouver Island summers could be like this - long and golden and dry. Usually Peter loved it, but this summer had gone further than usual, and his mom had started talking about water conservation, which meant be careful about how much water you use, because there isn't as much of it as we'd like.

"The wells get lower in dry summers," she'd explained at breakfast, sliding a newspaper across the table. There was a picture on the front page of a creek near Coombs that had shrunk to a thin trickle between cracked mud banks.

"And when the wells get lower, everyone has to share more carefully." Peter had looked at the picture for a long time. He knew that creek. He'd thrown sticks in it with Gracie in the spring, watched her wade in up to her belly, barking at the current as if she could chase it downstream. She'd come out dripping and delighted, shaking water in every direction.

The creek in the photo looked nothing like the one he remembered. It looked tired. He looked at Gracie, still stretched out on the kitchen tiles, watching him with one eye.

"What can we do?" he asked. His mom smiled. "Quite a lot, actually," she said. "Want to find out?"

They started with the obvious things.

Shorter showers. Peter set a timer on the bathroom shelf - four minutes - and raced it every morning. Gracie sat outside the bathroom door while he showered, and he could hear her occasionally scratching at the wood, which he took as encouragement.

Turning off the tap while brushing teeth. Peter had always known about this one but had never quite managed to actually do it. Now he did. It turned out to be extremely easy, and he felt mildly embarrassed that it had taken a drought to make him remember.

Only running the dishwasher when it was completely full. This one was Dad's job, but Peter appointed himself as the official inspector of dishwasher fullness, and twice that week caught his dad about to run it with space still inside.

"Not yet," Peter told him both times, with great authority.

"Right," his dad said both times, looking slightly sheepish.

Gracie took no particular interest in dishwasher policy. She did, however, take a very keen interest in the four-minute shower timer, which she had worked out meant Peter would emerge from the bathroom shortly after the beeping. She began sitting outside the bathroom door each morning before he could even turn the water on. Peter appreciated the company either way.

But the obvious things weren't enough. Peter could feel it - the sense that there was more to figure out, that the problem was bigger than four-minute showers and full dishwashers.

He sat on the back step one evening with Gracie beside him, both of them watching the dry yellow garden. The air was still warm at seven o'clock, and the sky was growing pink and orange over the trees. Gracie put her paw on his knee.

"I'm thinking," he told her. She left her paw there.

The first big idea came from watching the kitchen sink. His mom was rinsing vegetables for dinner - carrots and beans from the garden and letting the water run down the drain. Peter watched it go.

"Wait," he said. "Can't we save that water?"

His mom looked at the sink, then at Peter. "Well - what would we do with it?"

"The garden," Peter said. "The tomatoes are drooping. We could use the vegetable-washing water to water them instead of turning on the hose."

There was a pause. "That," his mom said, "is a very good idea."

They found a big plastic basin under the sink and put it under the tap. From then on, all vegetable-washing water, all rinsing water - any water that was clean enough but would otherwise go down the drain - went into the basin first.

Every evening, Peter carried it out to the garden and poured it around the base of the tomatoes and the beans and the struggling rosemary bush by the fence. Gracie accompanied him on every trip, supervising. The tomatoes, within a week, stopped drooping.

"We saved them," Peter told Gracie. Gracie sniffed a tomato plant, sneezed, and walked away.

"You're welcome," Peter said.

The second big idea came from Gracie herself, which Peter thought was only fair.

On the hottest afternoon of the whole summer - so hot that the air above the driveway shimmered, so hot that even the seagulls seemed to have gone somewhere else - Peter had been trying to figure out how to cool Gracie down without wasting water.

She needed a wash. She had found something in the garden early that morning that smelled absolutely terrible, and according to Gracie, was absolutely wonderful. Peter did not have enough water to run the hose for a proper dog-washing session. The hose was strictly for the vegetable garden only, and only in the evening.

He stood in the garden, frowning at the problem. Then he looked at the basin.

The basin from the kitchen, full of the morning's rinsing water. Not perfectly clean, but clean enough. Clean enough for a dog who had just rolled in something dirty.

Peter filled a second, smaller basin with fresh water from the tap and mixed in a little of Gracie's dog shampoo. He set both basins on the grass in the shade of the cedar tree.

"Gracie," he said. "Bath time."

Gracie gave him the look she reserved for bath time, as if she were a queen agreeing to something she didn't want to do.

Peter used the soapy basin for washing, the rinsing water for rinsing, and one final careful cup of fresh water for her face.

Gracie smelled considerably better afterwards and looked considerably fluffier, and sat in the shade of the cedar tree looking very pleased with her clean coat, while Peter poured the used bath water carefully around the roots of the tree.

"Nothing wasted," Peter said.

His dad, who had been watching from the back step with his arms folded and an expression Peter recognised as being impressed, nodded slowly. "Not bad, bud," he said. "Not bad at all."

The third big idea was the rain catcher - because the rain had to come back eventually. It always did on Vancouver Island. And when it did, Peter wanted to be ready.

He found the idea in a library book about gardening that his mom had on the shelf: a rain barrel. A large container placed under a drainpipe to catch the water that ran off the roof when it rained. Instead of the rainwater flowing into the ground and away, it collected in the barrel, where you could use it later for the garden.

"Can we make one?" Peter asked his dad.

"We can find one," his dad said. "There's a place in Parksville that sells them - repurposed food barrels."

The barrel was blue and enormous - 120 litres, which Peter's dad said was enough to water the whole vegetable garden three times over. They set it up together on a Saturday morning under the drainpipe at the back corner of the house, fitting a tap near the bottom so they could fill a watering can from it easily.

Gracie supervised the installation from the shade, occasionally sniffing the barrel and looking confused.

"It's for water," Peter explained. Gracie sniffed it again. It smelled of nothing. So she went back to her shady spot.

The barrel stood empty for 11 more days. Then, on a Tuesday afternoon, the clouds finally came in - gray and heavy - and by evening it was raining properly: the kind of rain that drummed on the roof and gurgled in the gutters and made the dry garden smell suddenly alive again.

Peter stood at his bedroom window and watched. Gracie sat beside him, also watching, her ears tracking every shift in the sound of the rain on the glass. When a particularly loud gust drove the drops hard against the window, she pressed her nose against the pane.

"It's filling up," Peter said. "Right now, the barrel is filling up."

He could feel it somehow, even though he couldn't see it - the water running off the roof into the gutter, down the pipe, splashing into the barrel in the dark. Thirty-two days of dry summer was being answered.

The next morning he went out in his boots and checked. The barrel was almost a third full.

"That's 40 litres of free rainwater," Peter said. "Ready to use."

Gracie put her paws up on the side of the barrel and looked in.

"40 litres," Peter told her. She looked at him, then back into the barrel, then at him again.

"Good girl," Peter said, and scratched behind her ears. She hadn't done anything, but it felt right to share the moment with her.

Later that week, Peter's mom helped him write up everything they'd done - a proper list, with drawings of each idea coloured in with his felt-tip pencils.

Four-minute showers (with a little timer drawing). Tap off while brushing teeth. Full dishwasher only. Basin for vegetable-washing water. Two-basin dog bath. Rain barrel (with an arrow pointing at the drainpipe).

He drew Gracie next to the rain barrel, because it seemed right. They pinned it to the fridge.

His mom read it over slowly. "You know," she said, "every single thing on this list matters. And if everyone in the whole neighbourhood did it - or across the whole town - it would add up to a lot."

"I know," Peter said. And then, because it was true and a little surprising: "It wasn't even that hard. Most of it just meant paying attention."

"The hard part," his mom said, "is usually just deciding to start. Everything else follows from there."

Peter thought about that. He looked at the list on the fridge. He looked at Gracie, who was sitting beside her water bowl - freshly filled from the rain barrel - lapping at it with great contentment.

"We started," he said.

"You started," his mom said.

Peter looked at Gracie. She had finished her water and was sitting back on her haunches, licking her nose, looking very satisfied with the world.

"We started," he said again.

And Gracie, without looking up from her water bowl, wagged her tail. 

The Ballad of Peter and Gracie: Peter and Gracie, the finest of friends, with tales of wonder that never end. In the pages of books or stars above, they find their magic in laughter and love.

Fireside Books: There's exciting news for book lovers. Fireside Books in Parksville now has a second location in Port Alberni. The BookWyrm — used books are just $5 or less. The BookWyrm, on the corner of Redford and Anderson, opens seven days a week from 10 to 5, building your personal library for less. Fireside Books at 464 Island Highway East in Parksville is a book dragon's dream come true. Browse their extensive collections seven days a week. Both locations make growing your personal library easier than ever. New and used books and so much more. Order online at firesidebooks.ca and pick up at either location. Details available online.