Clay Pots Everywhere Quenched Myanmar’s Thirst, Until They Vanished. (NYT) @hkbeech

I was once in love with a woman who wanted me to transplant a flowering thorn bush into a large clay water pot. She lay in her hammock under the areca palms watching me struggle with the project, laughing. I never cared to find out if she was laughing at me or just amused at the general tenor of the world. 
The brown clay pot held about twenty gallons of water. I pulled out the volunteer water lily and tipped the pot over. Wriggling mosquito larvae and little black snails washed over the courtyard. 
I used a hammer to drive a zinc nail into the bottom of the pot for aeration. Or rather, that's what I intended to do. The bottom of the pot was pretty thick. If I hit the hammer too hard the force of the blow would probably shatter the brittle pot entirely, so I tapped on the nail gently -- like a cobbler making expensive leather shoes for royalty. That got me nowhere. Plus the reverberation of the hammer off the nail head set my teeth on edge. An electric drill would have been the smarter idea, but I had no power tools. I had no money to buy power tools, because I spent too much on orchids and gold wire to string sea shells together. Orchids were actually pretty cheap, but we had hundreds of them scattered around on every fruit tree and palm. And I suspect the gold wire got 'recycled' by cousins who came to visit when the rice fields were dormant and burning -- so I had to keep buying more of it to string the beautiful sea shells I was convinced would sell as jewelry for an enormous profit. But the shells slowly turned a speckled brown, because I hadn't rinsed them in bleach prior to stringing them together -- so all sorts of mold and fungus mottled my jewelry until I couldn't give it away.
The brown clay water jar eventually developed a hairline crack along the bottom, of its own accord. So that took care of that.
Next I filled the bottom third with sand and broken bits of coral. Then I dug dirt up from the garden to fill up the rest, and put in the flowering thorn bush. I packed the dirt down and gave the whole shebang a good watering. 
It did well in the hot sun of the courtyard, and soon showed its true colors by shedding its disguise as an innocent little bush and turning into a vicious strangler vine -- with long sharp thorns. It wound its way around a faux marble pillar on the veranda and began its assault on the roof -- smothering air ducts and toppling the lightning rods. Fierce red ants raced up and down the main trunk, ready to inflict throbbing agony on anyone foolish enough to bend close to smell the small red flowers. At night their odor seemed to combine patchouli with Pine Sol. During the full moon Atlas moths blundered into the vine and were impaled by the thorns. Geckos swiveled up around the thorns to devour the helpless fluttering creatures.
Deep at night I heard vague rustling sounds around my bedroom window. In the morning when I went outside to investigate I found the thorn vine had crossed the entire roof and dropped down to encircle my bedroom window casements. It was getting ready to pounce. The cheap mosquito netting I hung over the open windows would never keep it in check.
"It does not like the color yellow" said the woman I loved mysteriously, when I showed her what was happening.
That was a big help.
Fortunately I escaped certain doom when my passport was revoked for beach combing and I had to head back to the colder reaches of the world. I told the woman I loved that I couldn't love her anymore, as I had a large family back home that needed me to nag them into something more than the slack jawed life of eBay sales.   
She laughed at me then, but in the corner of her eye I saw a red ant stinging her. Which made me want to forgive her. We parted the best of automatons.