Any Chance You Have Time to Read This Post?

By: | March 1, 2024

*If you are home and not busy, would F. be able to get a Ziploc of ice?

*Would one of you be able to do Monday morning carpool next week?

*Any chance you’d have time to work Friday lunch? S. is home sick.

*S. is staying home sick. Is there any chance you have time to do lunch today?

*Is one of you going to be home today? S. is home sick but I might leave him for an hour so I can exercise and not [have a mental health crisis] . . .  He says he is fine by himself but if something catches fire he will come and get you.

*Did R. seem ok to you on Friday? She’s been kind of low energy all weekend.

*Could I have a grownup buddy . . .to hide in the kitchen with me . . .?

*Can we split carpool Tuesday?

*Could S. come over to your house until about 3?

I was feeling weirdly uncomfortable last week when my husband went out of town. Being on my own with the kids is easier than it’s ever been—they’re friendly and fun to be with about 95% of the time, which is more than I can say for myself. On request, they empty dishwashers and make beds and get ready for school and even cook their own mac & cheese. There were no health emergencies, work crises, or other issues that made it particularly stressful.

I couldn’t figure it out until I looked at my texts.

Ugh. I hate asking for help. Typing out all those texts a second time feels like chalk squeaking along the inside of my ribs, a combination of how awkward each question sounds (“any chance”? Double ugh!)  and the fact that I had to ask it at all. The accumulation of each small request seems to weigh much more than it should.

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Snapshot: The Raccoons of Jewel Key

By: | February 28, 2024

First light on Jewel Key found the tide out and the raccoons hungry. I followed one along the exposed tidal flat that rimmed the south edge of this Everglades islet, Chokoloskee Bay at our backs, the glittering expanse of the Gulf of Mexico before us. The raccoon, or her ancestors, had come here under her own power, paddling the straits between mangrove islands; on past South Florida kayaking trips we’d actually seen the mammals swimming, bedraggled heads bobbing like coconuts in the chop. She scuttled over rocks and stranded kelp, ignoring the human shadowing her not ten feet away. Shortly she stopped, jammed one of her nimble paws into a crevice, and began to rummage in the crack’s invisible depths. She gazed at the sky in concentration, the universal look of an intelligent, dexterous creature trying to grasp an object she can’t quite see — the same look I wear whenever I try to fish my dropped cell phone out from beneath the driver’s seat. After a minute or two her paw emerged, gripping some kind of fleshy invertebrate, a shrimp maybe, or a small octopus. She lifted it to her mouth and tore in with the gleaming daggers of her teeth, lips audibly smacking. 

Watching her feast called to mind the Kelp Highway hypothesis, the notion that humans first dispersed through the Americas by following the Pacific coastline and snacking on clams, mussels, snails, crabs, and other bounty along the way. I don’t know how many of the Everglades’ mangrove islands are inhabited by raccoons, but it was easy to imagine them likewise colonizing the archipelago by hopping from land mass to land mass, sustaining themselves on the spineless creatures they pried from tide pools and rock shelves. To be a smart, resourceful mammal is to forage in the littoral zone, whether you’re a primate or a procyonid. 

Nobody Was Here

By: | February 26, 2024

I don’t know how I managed to not know this for my whole life, but here it is: the Americas were the last continents to have people on them. By around 30,000 years ago, all the other continents had people on them. We didn’t have any people. Nobody. Empty of people.

Why not? How do continents gets their people anyway? Well, in the beginning people evolved. They evolved in Africa, and later maybe some kind of evolution refinements were going on in Europe and Asia and Australia. But not here, not in the New World. I asked a couple of anthropologists, “Why not?” And they said “Nope, before 20,000 years ago, no evidence of people whatever. They just didn’t evolve here.”

“Well why not?” I said. “Wrong monkeys,” they said, and I’m paraphrasing. The great apes with the capacity for evolving into humans didn’t live here. We had only miscellaneous little monkeys — the New World monkeys which, granted, evolved from Old World monkeys but neither one evolved into humans. No, I don’t know why not.

So if people didn’t evolve here, they must have come in from the outside, from the other continents, immigrated in like immigrants, right? Right you are. Once homo sapiens — wise humans, somebody’s sense of humor I guess — evolved in Africa, they headed out on all directions. By 40,000 years ago, they’d moved over into Asia, down into Southeast Asia, up into Siberia, even to Australia, and up to Europe. They didn’t get to the Americas until about 20,000 years ago. The Siberians must have gotten curious about the stretch of land crossing the ocean to the east and trekked across it.

These people, the Asians, came in waves: an early, maybe the first, wave went straight south along the west coast, and by 14,500 years ago was at the tip of South America. Other waves, maybe around the same time, maybe later, came inland into North America, down an ice-free corridor between glaciers, then skirted the bottom of the glaciers and headed south and east — though the archeological evidence is indirect at best and inevitably hit-or-miss.

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Birding – PUBLISHED, Finally

By: | February 21, 2024

We, the People of LWON, write whatever the f*** we want. But on days when we just can’t, we rerun an old post. Today, I just can’t. And yet rerunning old posts is against my personal religion. So today I am excavating the blog post that I partially wrote in the summer of 2021 and then left sitting at the top of our content management system for two and a half years, where all of the People of LWON could see “Birding – DO NOT PUBLISH” every time they logged in. Now, their nightmare is over. Here it is, with notes.

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Sleep Talk with Me

By: | February 19, 2024

My 4-year-old has developed a borderline unhealthy obsession with Star Wars over the past month or so. Yesterday, as I was reading from our latest purchase, 5-minute Star Wars Stories, I fell asleep. I was in the middle of a chapter about Ewoks. I’ll give you the gist: Heroes end up on a planet with furry little people called Ewoks, Ewoks don’t trust them (except Leia), Ewoks believe golden robot C-3PO is some kind of supernatural being?, C-3PO convinces them to trust the heroes, they all go to blow up some bunker in order to destroy the Death Star’s shield. (Ok, everything I’ve learned about Star Wars, I’ve learned from 5-minute Star Wars Stories, but this doesn’t make any sense. Why is equipment key to the Death Star’s shield housed in a bunker on the surface of a planet? How does that even work? Why won’t the Ewoks believe Leia that the rest of the heroes are good guys, but they’ll believe C-3PO? Why does one of the Ewoks try to hug Han, and why was that exchange important enough to include in the 5-minute version of the story?)

Anyway, I digress. As I was reading, I fell asleep. Yet I kept on talking. It was a key moment in the story: The heroes are about to storm the bunker, and they’re confronted by Storm Troopers. In the actual story, the heroes disarm the Storm Troopers and enter the bunker. In my version, they confront the Storm Troopers and say “who made all this mess?” That line woke me up, because . . . what? My son and I laughed and laughed. It reminded me of this post, which originally ran in June 2020.

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Remnant of Eden

By: | February 16, 2024
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This post comes from 2015, which seems like lifetimes ago, and I don’t know what happened to the woman I interviewed or this small patch of earth in Iowa she was defending. I’ve often turned to this memory as a sign of hope in a decaying natural world, one person focusing her life on one small tangle of green in an empire of monoculture.

A summer not long ago I went for a grueling 3-day backpack through GMO cornfields in Iowa, camping among walls of waxy green leaves that sawed against each other in the breeze. I wanted to see what besides corn and soybeans lived out here. Not much, I found. Spiders and ants were few and only the smallest species survived. There were some mushrooms, but not many, and I happened into a whitetail deer one night. Otherwise, it was a catastrophic biological landscape, as if a bomb had gone off killing almost everything but a couple engineered species.

Thrashing out of the hot, dripping fields, my skin coated in sweat and grimy soil the consistency of shoe polish, I set off looking for signs of biologic hope in the area. I ended up at small patch of what is called virgin prairie, a plot of ground near the forgotten town of Butler Center where crops had never been planted. The town itself was gone, plowed under and turned into rows of corn, while this plot called the Clay Hills Preserve had been set aside. No plow had ever touched the ground.

Ruth Haan, a woman in her eighties, was one of the last on a board of volunteers overseeing the preserve. Locals warned me that Haan was losing her mental faculties. Her niece who drove her to the site to meet me on a blistering summer day said right in front of her that she was getting a little loopy.

“Oh, honey, I just need a little help now and then,” Haan said in her sundress, the fat of her arms hanging like handbags.

Haan pushed her wheeled walker across bumpy ground to reach the fence marking the refuge that she’d known her entire life. “Volunteers haven’t met for quite a while because most of us have died,” she said. “I sure hope someone will keep an eye on this after I’m gone. It’s the last piece around.”

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Well THAT Smells Warm

By: | February 14, 2024

God damn it, advertising can be powerful. I mean, not that I would ever buy some stupid crap because I saw it advertised on TikTok, of all platforms…that place is rife with over-hyped junk and over-painted hawkers (the term “influencer” makes my toes curl, no joke) and I’m not pathetic enough to fall for their BS.

Until I was. What got me: It was the yummy sounding scents that mean spring and sunshine and a breeze up your skirt. It was the arty images of grasses waving and glitter on the water and dandelion seeds in her hair. Damn it if a company that makes earthy perfumes didn’t grab me and hold me down and whisper sweet nothings against my forehead while I typed my credit card number into their website.

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