A Walker in the Suburbs

Speaking of warmth without shade, I just finished reading Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, which explains that we are living through an “extinction event” caused not by an asteroid or volcanic eruption but by homo sapiens. Consider these facts Kolbert presents:

“Human activity has transformed between a third and a half of the land surface of the planet. • Most of the world’s major rivers have been dammed or diverted. • Fertilizer plants produce more nitrogen than is fixed naturally by all terrestrial ecosystems. • Fisheries remove more than a third of the primary production of the oceans’ coastal waters. • Humans use more than half of the world’s readily accessible fresh water runoff.”

Most of all, Kolbert writes, citing Dutch scientist Paul Crutzen, who named this era “Anthropocene” to indicate that it is shaped by humans, we have changed the composition of the atmosphere. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the air has increased by 40 percent in the last 200 years.

All of these changes are happening faster than our world can adapt to them. So, despite the noble efforts we’ve taken to save individual species or to rid our forests of knotweed or other invasive plants, the fact is that the world we’ve created is changing the planet on which we live. Here’s Kolbert again:

“When the world changes faster than species can adapt, many fall out. This is the case whether the agent drops from the sky in a fiery streak or drives to work in a Honda. To argue that the current extinction event could be averted if people just cared more and were willing to make more sacrifices is not wrong, exactly; still, it misses the point. It doesn’t much matter whether people care or don’t care. What matters is that people change the world. This capacity predates modernity, though, of course, modernity is its fullest expression. Indeed, this capacity is probably indistinguishable from the qualities that made us human to begin with: our restlessness, our creativity, our ability to cooperate to solve problems and complete complicated tasks. As soon as humans started using signs and symbols to represent the natural world, they pushed beyond the limits of that world.”

The Sixth Extinction was published in 2015. The situation has only become more dire since then.

(Dinosaur footprints from the coast of Portugal.)

The Easter Bunny hopped in a day late, weather-wise. He arrived on Easter Sunday, but he missed Saturday’s blue skies and 85 degrees.

Instead, he ran into rain, wind and clouds.

By the end of the day, though, the sun made an appearance and a stiff breeze dried out the lawn so the kiddos could romp and play after dinner.

It wasn’t a picture-perfect Easter Sunday. But it didn’t have to be!

I wonder if April Fools pranks are on the wane, given the April Fool’s-esque quality of our country, its policies and discourse, its upside-down and inside-out craziness. Wars and bombings. Ballrooms and arches. The abandonment of kindness and decency and statesmanship.

Where’s a good prank when you need one?

Not here, I’m afraid.

But it’s a new month, a fresh start. Always something to celebrate in that.

It’s April! No fooling!

Enough weather posts for a while. I’ve read some great books lately. One of them is James Rebanks The Place of Tides.

My first Rebanks read was The Shepherd’s Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape, a paean to the placed life. Rebank’s family has been raising sheep on the same parcel of Cumbrian land for six centuries, and he uses this deep attachment to muse on the importance of rootedness. Like my fellow Kentuckian Wendell Berry, Rebanks is both a farmer and a writer. One role sustains the other.

Rebanks expands his horizons in his most recent book The Place of Tides, which chronicles the work of Anna, a Norwegian “duck woman” who preserves the ancient tradition of housing eider ducks on remote islands near the Arctic Circle. After spending a season with Anna, Rebanks writes, “a new calmness began to settle over me. It was a feeling I had not known since I was a child following my grandfather round his fields.”

Rebanks admires Anna’s fierceness, her devotion to the eider ducks and the ducks’ trust in her. Anna’s efforts are keeping a tradition alive. In Anna, Rebanks finds a way out of his own confusion and doubt.

“Anna asked me if I would write a book about her and what kind of book it would be. I answered that I wasn’t sure, but that if I did, I would write about her work, her island, her family’s story, and her own life. I told her I could never know the whole of her, another human entirely, a woman, and someone from another culture to my own — such a thing was probably impossible, but if I did write an account, I would try to make it as true as I could. I explained that I was trying to see the world through her eyes. I would probably try to make of her life a kind of fable. I asked if that would be OK, and she said yes.

I am only the storyteller. She is the story.”

(The North Sea viewed from the Orkney Islands, about 350 miles from Anna’s home on the west coast of Norway.)

Schools dismissed early. County courts closed. Yet the feared tornados did not arrive. A little after 7 p.m. I slipped outside for a post-dinner walk, making my way through the humid dusk.

The storm warning had ended and a high-wind warning had yet to begin. The jets were not yet flying low over the neighborhood. I could hear the owls hooting in the woods, could see the yellow glow of lamplight from houses across the street.

It felt like an achievement, getting outside on this wild weather day. It felt like I had accomplished something. The most elemental of all accomplishments — moving through space — but sometimes, that’s enough.

(No rainbow last night, but the day before St. Patty’s Day, you’d better believe I was looking for one.)

Last weekend, I pulled off a surprise party for Tom. I had partners in crime, especially my daughters, but I was feeling the pressure. Would one of us give it away? Would guests arrive on time?

My worries were for naught. Partygoers arrived promptly, parked where instructed (away from the house), and did everything they could to throw the birthday boy off the scent.

Now that the dust has settled I’ve been thinking about the nature of surprises, how people like to be in on them. So many of life’s sudden revelations are unpleasant ones. A call in the night. A rushed trip to the hospital.

To participate in a happy surprise is a gift. In fact, it’s as much a gift for the bystander as for the guest of honor, who may be in shock.

Does this mean I want to plan another surprise party anytime soon? No thank you!

Photo by Beverly Tomb

I woke to a foggy world. The snow still carpeting my backyard seems to be rising into the air, transforming itself from a solid to a gas, skipping the liquid state altogether. Is there a name for this?

Yes, there is. It’s sublimation, I learn, or relearn, since surely I was tested on this at some point in my schooling. Sublimation is the noun; sublime is the verb.

It doesn’t look sublime (adjective). It looks like a soggy mess. Tufts of ground cover emerge from the now-softened snowcrete. A lone limb lies helter-skelter under the witch hazel tree. It’s more Ash Wednesday than Shrove Tuesday.

Shrove Tuesday it is, though. Also not sublime, because this day of feasting precedes a day of fasting. On the other hand, I have some time before the boom is lowered. I think I’ll go downstairs now and have a piece of cake for breakfast. Now that is sublime.

I’m just in from a shoveling session. Having spent Sunday and Monday in a snow-induced, soup-making fog, I woke up Tuesday to a weather report that showed single-digit lows the rest of the week. This frozen world won’t be thawing anytime soon. It was time to join the shoveling crew.

I started with the snow shovel and quickly realized that using it alone was like raking leaves with a fork. A regular shovel was required, a tool with a sharp edge that could chip away at the several inches of frozen stuff on top of the fluffier white precipitation underneath.

The funny thing about this top layer, though, is how I finally removed it. I used my shovel as a fulcrum and pried it up. Chunks loosened and cracked, like tectonic plates. I tried to use my best form as I crouched low to pick up each ice floe and toss it into the yard.

In this way, ever-so-slowly, the dark macadam began to emerge. Expose enough of it and there’s traction.

(From a long-ago, fluffier snow. The car’s the same, though.)

I gave it to myself, a gift of my own devising. A reading day where nothing was expected other than to move my eyes across the page. And move them I did.

First, the Sunday newspaper. A ritual in a long-ago life, reading the paper has become a much quicker endeavor. If I’m rushed I can make it through all the sections in 30 minutes. Gone are the days when I’d pick up the Sunday New York Times on Saturday night, so I wouldn’t have to run out to a newsstand (remember those?) to buy it.

Newspapers are shorter and less inky-messy than they used to be. Time is more precious. But yesterday was devoted to reading, just the same. After the paper I dipped into a couple of different books, finishing one and making progress in another.

After dinner, I watched a movie. It was a day spent largely in other worlds. Not a bad way for a January Sunday to unfold.

(Talk about other worlds: I snapped this photo at the Chiricahua Desert Museum in Rodeo, New Mexico.)

The boxes and bows are sorted and stowed away. I’ve found most of the teenage mutant ninja turtles that hid in my house after Christmas morning. The tsunami wave that is the holidays has peaked and begun to ebb.

What remains is the holiday table. The gathering of kinfolk around a roast or casserole, foods heavier than my usual fare but tasty and festive. Some of these meals have been eaten in chaos, while babies throw their cups on the floor and preschoolers pick at buttered noodles. But others have been nibbled in blissful adults-only configurations. I’ve enjoyed both of these arrangements!

I wish the holiday table would remain indefinitely. Luckily for my waistline, it does not.

(More salads are in my future.)