Our Planet: Under Threat

By: | May 10, 2019

A few weeks ago, I started watching the eight-part series Our Planet with my daughter. I thought it would be a good alternative to cartoons. “Ahh, a nature documentary,” I thought. “She gets to watch TV. I get to feel like she’s learning something. Win-win.”

I was so wrong. The show delivers spectacular footage and animal antics, sure, but the content is hard to stomach. Even the soothing sound of David Attenborough’s voice can’t soften the main message: climate change is profoundly affecting all life on this planet and, unless we do something fast, we’re all screwed.

How do you explain this to a three-year-old? Mostly I don’t.

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In which I might learn the difference between baking soda and baking powder

By: | May 9, 2019

Despite having spent many years eating I still have much to learn about cooking. For example, I did not know there was any particular technique needed to fry an egg. When my husband walked my oldest son through the steps of egg frying, it was a night full of revelations—and not just for the intended student. These are just a few of the tips I picked up: sprinkle salt from high above the pan so that you do not get a salt clump; push the oil around with the spatula; do not leave the spatula resting on the hot pan. (Ok, I sort of knew that last one.)

What I can do is read a recipe. I can measure things and follow directions, more or less. Yet I know I am often just skimming the surface, as I did when I memorized things like the times tables and mnemonics like sohcahtoa. The unknowable lies behind the ingredient list, but I am usually hungry enough that I do not really feel like getting to know the unknowable at the time.

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My Kid is a Genius. Kind Of. Maybe.

By: | May 8, 2019

Recently I’ve started research on a new book proposal about developmental psychology and achievement. And, by research, I mean tinkering with my child’s mind.

Nothing invasive, mind you – I would never do that. And besides, it turns out home electroshock therapy kits are crazy expensive. It’s not like back in my day when dad would just grab his Rorschach cards, pop the car hood, grab the jumper cables and call me over.

Anyway, naturally all of my experiments have revealed that my child is a budding genius. Musical prodigy with the tambourine, swimming phenom in the two-foot-deep kiddie pool and a voracious reader at three and a half.

This last one I am especially proud of. Recently, my three-year-old graduated from mostly picture books to mostly writing ones. For those of you without children, it’s a pretty big deal.

Now, I don’t want to brag but I … no, I really just want to brag. What’s that? Your kid is still reading Elmo’s Secret Birthday Party, Part 4? Oh how tedious. Yes, no our little one is reading The Spiderwick Chronicles. Yes, I know, that is very precocious, isn’t it?

Then I smugly strut away wondering when we can start reading Les Miserables or The Iliad. That night, curled up together in our favorite rocking chair, we read volume three of his favorite new book series (we skipped volume one – that’s how clever he is).

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Trillium, a spring flower that lives as long as we do.

By: | May 7, 2019
Emma Marris

It is spring in the mountains, for I have seen my first trillium.

These extremely elegant woodland flowers are called trilliums because they have just three lovely petals. They are also known as “wake robin” because they traditionally bloom in little patches of sunlight in the forest around the same time the spring robins appear.

My mother taught me never to pick trilliums, because they aren’t annuals; the same plant emerges from an underground rhizome and flowers year after year. They can grow to be over 70 years old.

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The End Can Be Like This

By: | May 6, 2019

This piece first ran a few years back around Mothers’ Day. It’s nearly time again to celebrate our moms. I miss mine so very much.

My mother was dying. It was time to get ready.

First came the visit to a funeral home where we walked among the coffins as if shopping for a new couch. Deep woods polished shiny; insides pillowed, all velvets and ruffles; pallbearer handlebars in brass or chrome. But no, too fancy, and she’d be cremated anyway, my mother who hated a chill, was never warm enough—especially in her last weeks. (Brain cancer steals away everything that makes us feel human.)

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The Once and Future Canadian Disease

By: | May 3, 2019

On a February day in Ottawa, the Rideau Canal is teaming with skaters. Along the 7km length of canal, kids and adults alike enjoy some small compensation for the face-burning cold of our long winters. We eat the thick, sugared pancake known as the Beavertail, drink hot chocolate, and feel the ice whip by under our skates.

Canada is just about as far from a tropical country as it is possible to be, but in the late 1820s, the Scots and French Canadian Royal engineers who built the Rideau Canal—a 220km canal system between Kingston and Ottawa—died of one disease more than any other: malaria.

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OK Google, Search: My Life

By: | May 2, 2019
search-bar

Google saved my life so many times last month, as I trudged through Europe alone. Without Maps, I would never have made it to my meetings, train connections, flights, meals, or anything. Google sent alerts to remind me when to leave; it translated my questions, so I could bleat them in a pathetic form of German to ask for help. I would never have made it if Google hadn’t been there for me. I owe it so much. 

This makes me extremely uncomfortable. 

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A bird in the hand

By: | April 30, 2019

The marmoset looked unlikely on the filing cabinet. It reclined on a piece of poster board, its skinny arms folded across its chest. Its cotton-stuffed eyes stared at the low, tiled ceiling. The specimen room smelled strongly of tea and cornmeal.

Carina pulled the handle of a taller cabinet, and Mo and I leaned in. The three of us—college student, photographer, and writer—had other things we were supposed to be doing. But here, behind the door, there were rows of enticing labeled drawers. Each cabinet, a family—the corvids, the alcids, the procellariids. Each drawer, full of birds. We lifted the owls, the nighthawks, the warblers. We tested their weight. They were light as paper in our hands. I noted the way their feathers layered over one another into soft curves and colors, like summer clouds. The way they gave under the press of fingertips. We moved from family to family, touching clawed feet and folded wings. We exclaimed over this great collection of the dead the way others might coo over kittens. My people, I thought, looking at the other women.

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