It is a Gamble tradition that each child can select one present to open on Christmas Eve, ahead of the Christmas Day onslaught. On a nature ramble yesterday with my father and me, my son asked if he could open his when we got back to the house, around 2pm.
“Christmas Eve,” says I. “The clue is in the name.”
“Christmas Eve is the day before Christmas,” says he. “Eve just means before something. For example, ‘Evening’ means ‘before night’. ‘Eve’-‘ning’.”
“’Twas the ning before Christmas,” says I. “….hmm, that doesn’t sound quite right.”
I am used to such lawyering from my firstborn. The joke used to be that he would grow up to be a children’s rights lawyer. But in that moment I realized that many children are just that—little Ruth Bader Ginsburgs shifting the bars of their cages ever so slightly—and that the gains they make can actually build on those that have been made by children before them.
Because who negotiated that rule that children can open just one present on Christmas Eve? It’s a sure bet that wasn’t a parent’s idea. That rule has the distinct flavour of a wheedling child, a Gamble of past generations wearing down her mother, not suspecting her sons and grandsons would be opening presents on Christmas Eve right into the 21st century, harvesting the fruits of her efforts.
So parents, before you give in to the next incremental change, consider this: your descendants down the line may be eating that extra piece of chocolate cake into eternity. Choose wisely.
The first recorded sighting of the strange birds occurred in August. A man posted a picture on my Facebook neighborhood group: Plump, chicken-esque body. Red beak. Black-and-white striped wings. Bandit mask over the eyes. Commenters were quick to ID the bird. Definitely a chukar. More photos revealed there were at least five roaming the streets. My neighbors were instantly smitten. “May we keep them?” one woman asked. “I love them.”
In this year of darkness, today brings something to celebrate. Winter solstice is the shortest day of the year, which means the light will finally start returning. And this year, the first day of winter also marks a special celestial event — the Jupiter-Saturn Great Conjunction.
Imagine that our solar system is a racetrack, and each of the planets is a runner circling the sun in their own lane, with the Earth toward the center of the stadium, Henry Throop, a NASA astronomer, said in an explainer. “From our vantage point, we’ll be able to see Jupiter on the inside lane, approaching Saturn all month and finally overtaking it on December 21.”
It’s been almost 800 years since Saturn and Jupiter were this close in our sky and not too near to the sun or low in the sky to be seen by most Earthlings. Saturn is much dimmer than Jupiter, because it’s smaller and almost twice as far away, but their paths through our sky will make them appear so close from our vantage point so as to almost appear as one.
Poets may find metaphors or deeper meaning in this fortuitous alignment of the planets, but from a scientific perspective it’s simply a cool demonstration of geometry and our place in the Milky Way relative to these two neighbors.
I’ve been observing the two bright planets all year, watching them slowly converge. Last Thursday, I went for a run at sunset and as the sky went from shades of pink and red to deep blue turning to black, the bright glow of Jupiter and Saturn put on a show in the southwest sky.
I’m writing this on Sunday night (12/20) and this evening after sunset I spent some time looking at the two planets. Saturn and Jupiter are still distinct, both with the naked eye and through low powered binoculars. Tonight, they will almost converge when observed from Earth. (According to Joe Rao at Space.com they probably still won’t look like a single point, at least not to people like me with good eyesight. But they will still look really cool!)
One of my favorite things about living in the rural West is looking up at the dark sky. I once stayed up most of the night with my friend Rosemerry, gazing at the sky full of of stars overhead and pondering our place in this vast universe. It’s a thing I can’t get enough of — that feeling of being totally at home in my surroundings while also sensing the wondrous expanse beyond my native planet.
I can’t wait to get more of that tonight, and I hope you will too. The two planets are bright enough to be seen without any aid, but if you live in a very light city or are unlucky enough to have cloudy skies tonight, the Lowell Observatory is hosting a livestream of the event on YouTube, which you can watch here.
Images:
Photo of Jupiter and Saturn over the landscape of the Sacred Mountains of Gran Canaria by Starry Earth, via Flickr.
Stone bull’s head rhyton used for libations, from the Little Palace of Knossos (1600-1450 BC). Heraklion Archaeological Museum, Carole Raddato.
Just down the road from my house, there lived a bull. He had a massive, muscular neck and a glossy black coat that rippled as he strode around the pear orchard that served as his pasture. In fall, when the pears ripened, the bull rubbed against the old trees, shaking their trunks until the fruit fell to the ground. Other animals came to eat pears too; wild turkey, geese, and deer. But the bull was my favorite to watch, so fat and majestic.
One day it occurred to me that the trees were so full of pears that the bull could never eat them all. For a moment I contemplated what might happen if I (ever so quickly and quietly) jumped over the fence to grab one.
As if reading my thoughts, the bull lifted his enormous head and fixed me with his inscrutable brown eyes. I froze. Would he charge? Would I get smushed? Maintaining eye contact, he rubbed his enormous flank against a pear tree, using so much of his weight I thought he might snap the tree in half. Pears fell by the dozen, thumping in the dirt around him. As the bull bent his neck to the ground, picked up a pear, and started to chew, he held my gaze, seeming to ask:
Humans have worshipped bulls in various forms for more than 10,000 years, when they first domesticated bos taurus. There’s the humped white bull Nandi, beloved vehicle of the Hindu god Shiva; Apis, a fertility god of Egypt; the Bull of Heaven, from the Epic of Gilgamesh. In one creation myth from ancient Iran, the bull was the first animal; in a Christ-like parallel, the sacrifice of his blood and flesh renews the world.
Statue of Nandi, a patient deity, wearing a necklace, pearls, and hanging bells. Hari Krishna/Wikimedia commons.
Humans being humans, they’ve also used bulls as symbols of control and brute force (see Zeus and the rape of Europa; Minotaur the man-eater; the Wall Street Bull; the bulldozer.) When the Pope wants something done, he writes a papal bull, sealed by the bubble of official papal wax known as a bulla.
One of my favorite bull stories, The Story of Ferdinand, is about a young Spanish bull who does not enjoy fighting, but prefers to sit under a cork tree and smell the flowers. The simple power of Ferdinand’s story, I think, is that it unravels the old conflation of male strength and violence, revealing such macho projections for what they really are: bullshit. (Disliking what he deemed its pacifist message, Hitler ordered the book to be burned.)
Hercules performing one of his labors as he forces a bull to the ground. Engraving by B. Picart, 1731, the Stapleton Collection/Wikipedia.
In 2009, a red and white Hereford named Dominette became the first cow to have its genome sequenced; since then, the cattle industry has invested millions in efforts like the 1000 Bull Genomes Project, which aim to optimize the modern bovine from rump to udder. Last year several outlets reported that nearly all US dairy cows are descended from just two bulls, dangerously narrowing their genetic diversity. Today, most bulls are owned not by small farmers but by genetics companies; the San Diego firm Illumina promises that their patented genetic screen, the BovineHD Genotyping BeadChip, will ensure cows with “exceptional tenderness” and “better marbling.”
Breed success, their brochure croons. Join the revolution.
A few weeks ago I noticed that the bull next door was gone, along with all the cows in the orchard. I’ve never met the neighbors who keep him, but even in normal times I’d have had to screw up a fair amount of courage to walk up their long driveway and ask where they took him. It would sound a bit odd under the best of circumstances — Hello, I’ve been watching your house, where is the bull? –but it feels odder than usual, wearing my mask, to knock on a stranger’s door and ask after their livestock.
“Where do bulls go in winter?,” I typed into Google instead, fearing that after fattening himself on autumn pears, the bull had been sent to the slaughterhouse. Thankfully, I learned his owners have probably just moved him somewhere warm, to protect his valuable, vulnerable testicles from frostbite. Scrotal frostbite is a serious threat to bull fertility, not only damaging the quality of semen, but a bull’s desire to mate, I learned: In one study, Beef magazine reports, “some refused to service cows for six months following the blizzard.”
Minoan bull leaping fresco, detail. Wolfgang Sauber, Archaeological Museum of Herakleion.
Every morning now, I look at the ice crystals sparkling on the empty pear orchard, and hope the bull is cozy in a barn somewhere, wearing a thick winter coat reminiscent of his wild predecessor Bos primigenius, the auroch.
Wherever he’s gone, I hope someone is appreciating his majesty and mystery, and not just his meat or his gonads. I wish I could trace his head in graceful sweeps of red chalk, like the cave painters of Lascaux, or carve his bust out of serpentine and mother of pearl, like the Minoan sculptors of the Bull’s Head rhyton. Instead, I built this tiny version out of modeling clay, a talisman until the bull returns.
Recently Ann wrote that, in the pandemic, she’d been paying attention to “the world that exists when I’m not noticing it, the world that goes on about its own business.”
The other day, the world did something fantastic. It passed through the dust from an asteroid, giving us the Geminids. This is apparently one of the better meteor showers, but I’d never paid attention to it before. Who goes and stares at the sky outside when it’s cold? Not me.
But this weekend I heard the Geminids were coming, and it was going to be clear, and this year I’ve decided I have to put up with cold if I ever want to see my friends in person, so I suggested to a friend that we go chase them. She has a warm coat, so she agreed, and my parents agreed too, so all of us sat in the cold in a field behind a middle school in the suburbs, waiting for pieces of dust to burn.
The sunsets right now seem like they’re apologizing for the rest of the year. They are totally glorious—pink and orange, purple and gold. The sky seems to hollow out and give me extra room to breathe. Even tonight, when the sunset is bands of whites and grays, there is something that seems different about it then during the rest of the year. In the winter, the low angle of the sun stretches out the sunset, giving us more time to watch the light linger on the cloudscape. This more leisurely change of light, along with generally drier air and fewer particles in the atmosphere, as NOAA meteorologist Stephen Corfidi told Voxlast year, gives this season its striking sunsets. The shorter days, too, have given me the chance to see the sun’s arrival and departure. It rises right now just around seven in the morning, and sets before five, hours where it’s easy for me to be awake and looking at the sky. Elsewhere, the days are even shorter, with even fewer hours in between the beginning of the light and the end. Now the sunrise and sunset feel more like bookends to the day than in other seasons. Maybe because the hours in between feel like something to be survived, sometimes. Maybe because I never know what each new day will bring—not that I ever did, but I thought I did. Starting and ending each day with the sun reminds me of another of my current obsessions, poet Pádraig Ó Tuama and his Poetry Unbound podcast. At the beginning of the podcast, he reads a poem. Then he spends some time discussing the poem. And then, at the end, he reads it again. It’s not the same recording of the poem, played twice. It’s the same poem, the same voice, but different. There are always subtle differences in how Ó Tuama reads the poem the second time. I hear it differently, too. I hear it after learning more about the poet, about their background, about what they might be aiming toward. I hear it after hearing Ó Tuama’s music—I meant to write “musings” right then, but the spell-check had other, better ideas—about what the poem might mean to him, to others, in the context of the world and of the room where I sit. The poem is something else now, on the second reading. It means more, it feels more familiar, more comfortable and also more immense. And so, too, with the sunset. Ever since dawn, the day has been unfolding. Whatever news has already come, the meals have been made, the school Zooms have started and ended, the daily email from the public health department has arrived. This changing of the light means more now that the day has finished speaking, now that I can start to think about what it said.
*
Image by Pedro Szekeley, via Flickr/Creative Commons license
For the last few days I’ve been slowly completing an annual rite of fall: raking leaves. The colossal Norway maple that looms over our yard, which sheds each October with all the messy gusto of a yellow lab on a dark couch, makes this a rather herculean task. For most people, leaf-raking is utterly quotidian, but for me, it’s a bit of an occasion — the last yard maintenance chore of the year, a year in which we successfully managed to not get evicted for our slovenly lawncare habits. Now winter can just bury everything, allowing us to forget about watering, mowing, raking, or seeding for the next, oh, five months. In celebration of this mundane milestone, I’m re-upping a post from last autumn, about how our peaceful protest against society’s lawn obsession nearly got us booted from our home. Enjoy — and, crap, I just realized I need to shovel the sidewalk…
***
The inevitable knock came one afternoon this September — the tail of Spokane summer, the season of drought and grasshoppers. My landlord stood on the stoop, placid and patient as a mountain lion, shiny black SUV idling in my — his — driveway.
How’s it going? I asked, attempting nonchalance.
He took off his sunglasses. Well, I’ve been better. Then he handed me the Notice to Vacate.
It was, truthfully, a well-earned eviction. When Elise and I had moved into our rental, a two-bedroom with a capacious back yard, a year earlier, we’d been given just one inviolable command: keep the grass looking sharp. Let the plumbing rust, the shutters slough off, the paint peel, you name it — but the lawn, our landlord instructed, was to remain sacrosanct, as verdant and groomed as the greens at Augusta.
Aesthetically, the request was reasonable: It was only natural our landlord would want his property to match the others on our leafy street. Climatically, though, it was absurd. Spokane gets around 16 inches of precipitation per year, less than half the national average. A lawn, in our semi-arid corner of the Northwest, is an extravagance. Each evening, as I watched the sprinklers vomit water over our pointless, decorative crop, I burned with environmental shame — whatever you call the hydrologic equivalent of flygskam.
And, fine, it also just came to feel like a hell of a lot of work: Who’d voluntarily spend even twenty minutes on a Saturday afternoon shoving around a deafening John Deere?
After a few months, we began to let the lawn slide. Skilled self-justifiers, we recast our laziness as civil disobedience.Burn your hoses! Scrap your mowers! We would, we vowed, create an urban jungle through benign neglect.
We were, of course, very late arrivers to the anti-grass rebellion (which, alas, doesn’t appear to be making much progress). “Under the mower’s brutal indiscriminate rotor, the landscape is subdued, homogenized, dominated utterly,” lamented Michael Pollan in a 1989 essay. Lawns — “nature under culture’s boot,” as Pollan memorably put it — are America’s largest irrigated crop, guzzling more water than corn, wheat, and orchards combined. You can find equally appalling statistics about chemical inputs, gasoline spillage, habitat loss. At the very least, every wasted square inch of Kentucky bluegrass comes at a steep opportunity cost. When desperate butterflies have to seek sustenance from ragged strips of roadside milkweed, you know you’ve seriously screwed up the landscape.
***
Our laissez-faire subversion began promisingly enough. Nourished by April rains, our backyard grew luxuriant as a pre-colonial Kansas prairie. Each morning our dog vanished into the sumptuous pasture, her whereabouts betrayed only by the canopy’s rustling, as though she were the monster in a horror movie set among cornfields. As the days lengthened we drank beer on the back porch and watched our stems sway in unison, tousled by spring breezes like kelp in the surf.
As summer wore on, our little patch of tall-grass paradise began to senesce. The lawn brittled, its brown stems snapping at their bases under their seedheads’ weight. Keeled-over stalks somehow knitted together into a dense, reedy mat of dogshit-strewn straw. It looked less like a prairie and more like, well, a vacant and highly flammable lot.
For all its flagrant unattractiveness,though, it was still ecologically rich, or so we rationalized: picked over by our resident house sparrows, furrowed by rodents, brightened by the occasional cedar waxwing. It was an eyesore, sure, but to our wild neighbors, it was a refuge.
Now, our landlord’s letter rattling in my hand, I begged for clemency. We can fix this, I pleaded. Give us a week.
He shook his head. I don’t even know how you’re going to cut it, he said. You’d need a scythe. He sighed, considered, put his sunglasses back on. I’ll be back next Wednesday for another inspection, he said at last. I want this place completely transformed. Then he was gone. We’d received a stay of execution.
***
Although the prospect of eviction terrified us, we could take solace in the knowledge that we were not alone. As Kevin Kelley griped in High Country News this summer, the care of countless rental homes in the arid West falls to tenants who, for all their love of xeriscaped pollinator gardens, have no landscaping authority themselves. When Kelley quit watering his lawn in Boise, his landlord kept his security deposit and charged him for yardwork. Sighed Kelley:
I drove by the property a few weeks later. Everything but the grass patches and oldest trees was gone. Without shade from the elms or groundcover, sunlight cooked the dirt into dust. The landlord’s mission to bring the land back to a monocultured lot negated any environmental good I thought I had done.
Our own landlord’s ultimatum likewise dispelled any delusion that we were masters of our own domain. The next week passed in a blur of weeding, mowing, seeding, and other gardening gerunds. Neither Elise nor I had ever been yard people, and I shudder to think where we would have been without generous friends and instructional YouTube videos (“how to thread a weed-whacker,” in particular, turned out to be a surprisingly robust subgenre). When this story is optioned for cinema, here’s where we’ll slot the inspirational montage — sweat beading our brows as we lug mulch bags to “Eye of the Tiger.”
If I’d had any doubts about the lunacy of lawns, our crash course put them to rest. We dumped fertilizer and non-native seed on the bare patches, poured gas can after gas can into a borrowed mower, and turned our sprinklers on 24-7 blast, undoing a year of water conservation in a single binge of flood irrigation. Worst of all was the infernal weed-whacker, whose whirling nylon string, I learned (and, yes, I probably should have known this already) disintegrates as it flays your vegetation, spitting microplastics into the environment like a machine gun. All we were missing was Agent Orange.
The heavy artillery did its brutal work. Over a week, our enclave of habitat vanished, replaced by a tidy square of suburban conformity. Vivid green replaced dust-brown with an almost miraculous alacrity.A week after our spree began, our landlord returned as promised.He sidled up to the fence and peered over, inscrutable as ever.
What do you think, I asked with trepidation.
Looks good, he said, and permitted his face to relax into a thin smile.Thanks for taking the bull by the horns.We shook hands, and with that he was back in his SUV, off to wrangle the next cabal of dissidents.
Our largely self-inflicted ordeal was over. I admit it: I felt a twinge of guilty pride at having brought the earth to heel. We’d imposed our will upon nature, beaten back the elements, and learned a few practical domestic skills along the way. Even Pollan had confessed some satisfaction at “the sense of order restored that a new-cut lawn exhales… mowing the lawn is, in both a real and metaphorical sense, how I keep the forest at bay and preserve my place in this landscape.”
Mostly, though, I felt — what’s the word? — sad. I’d preserved my own place at the expense of everyone else’s. Weed-whacking the base of our garage one day, I’d found a delicate praying mantis the color of dry hay, its famous forelegs folded in what looked, in that moment, like supplication. I’d watched it roam across my palm before placing it in an untended strip of brush next door. Then, with my gas-powered microplastic disperser, I’d flattened its habitat.
When I look in the mirror, though everything is mildly blurry, I can’t not see the signs of aging I used to think might miraculously skip me—back when I was being carded in bars (at 43!!). But there they all are, the sags and swollen bits, the divots and wrinkles, the spots and stiff (and very sudden) stray hairs. (Silver lining of the pandemic? Masks. The bigger the better.)
I know, I know…I’ve complained about these annoyances before, yadda yadda, and the denial, anger, begging, and sadness should be long over; I should just accept what can’t be changed, embrace it, even. But I’m still treading water between pissed off and pleading. Damn you, roly-poly extra-padded parts and damn you, parts that are all skin, no pad! Damn you 50+ neck, you abomination! (If you tighten up I promise to stop denying the duct tape-belly roll incident, as a public service.)
How unfortunate, too, is the fate of the nose and ears when you add time to the mix. I’d always heard they look bigger on older people because they never stop growing, but the truth is more tragic: They look supersize because gravity is a monkey that swings from every appendage, and after decades the cartilage finally breaks down and gives in to the stretch and droop. Far-reaching schnoz and earlobes like clown feet? It’s my destiny. (I’ve seen the photos of my Granny. Bless her heart.)
Meanwhile, you’d think after so many years looking at animals this would have occurred to me sooner, but here is my new revelation: The traits I hate the most in my aging self are, on other animals, friggin’ adorable. Have you seen a basset hound’s ears? A panda’s tummy? A baby elephant’s scribbly skin and a mastiff’s low-hanging jowls? Does anyone see an eagle’s beak and think “she should have gotten that done years ago”? I submit that no one has.
If I were truly brave I’d juxtapose the following images with pictures of the relevant parts on myself, but I’m choosing to leave it to your imagination. Now, try to be nice.
