Audio By Carbonatix
I’m back in the town where I grew up, the town where my father grew up, the town where his father moved 130 years ago, the town that started out as an Illinois farm community but is now a pricey suburb of Chicago whose water is tied for second-best in the country with another place I know well: Denver.
The results of the contest, the seventh annual competition run by the Denver-based American Water Works Association, were announced earlier this summer . Having the hometown advantage apparently wasn’t enough to lift Denver over tiny Glencoe, much less move ahead of the ultimate winner; Greenville, South Carolina. And few people bothered to take note of the second-place finishers, which seemed to have little in common but good-tasting water.
And the fact that I’ve lived in both of these places for significant portions of my life.
Gulping water from the drinking fountain outside of the library where I spent endless hours as a kid, I don’t notice much difference between the water of Glencoe and what comes out of the tap in Denver.
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But it no longer tastes like home.
More from our Calhoun: Wake-Up Call archive: “Thomas Hornsby Ferril House is part of Denver’s history — and could be history.”
