Unsheltered

by Barbara Kingsolver

When someone mattered like that, you didn’t lose her at death. You lost her as you kept living.

A mother can be only as happy as her unhappiest child. Willa believed in the power of worry to keep another human from flying out of orbit.

“White is not an origin. It’s a mental construct of privilege.”

“Holding and synthesizing information in your brain creates your personality. You’re surrendering your personality to an electronic device in your pocket.”

So much of life with infirmity came down to dignity and will.

Willa marveled at his capacity to live a life undisturbed by actual evidence.

Was it ridiculous to be excited about seeing your husband in the middle of the day, after the passage of marital decades? Most of her girlfriends over the years had thought so, and were always a little too glad to advise Willa of her husband’s weak points.

Mary Treat, one of the best-known woman scientists of the nineteenth century, who corresponded with Darwin. Quite a lot of

Damn Hurricane Sandy and the damn Park Service budget cuts. We can’t afford to stop doing the shit that’s screwing up the weather, and can’t afford to pick up the pieces after we do our shit.”

The wounds of this ruptured nation lie open and ugly.”

“To stand in the clear light of day, you once said. Unsheltered.”

“I wonder what service is possible, Mary. When half the world, with no understanding of Darwin at all, will rally around whoever calls him a criminal and wants him hanged.”

“When men fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order.” “If that is our nature, then nature is madness. These are more dangerous times than we ever have known.”

“I wish we had a life that didn’t have to leave behind a trail of broken pieces.”

To converse with Chris was to wander in a maze of extraneous details.

From some storms no shelter was possible.

“Want want want!” Tig shouted. “That’s the only force in your equation. So you have to be a whore, licking the balls of the Wall Street bull.”

“And here is God’s advice on discipline, from the Psalms.” Thatcher read from copied notes, having brought no Bible to his podium, now wishing he had. “‘Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones. That taketh the infants from their mothers’ arms and dashes out their brains against a rock.’”

All disguise here had fallen away: no more the jocular carnival barker, their king was a vengeful despot.

He said he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and people would still vote for him. Am I dreaming this?” Willa asked.

“Apparently he was right.”

“But still, it’s surreal. That the electorate could validate such a mean, grabby, self-aggrandizing man. At any level.”

He’s legitimizing personal greed as the principal religion of our country.”

“No, but this one’s apparently kind of a savant, incapable of pretending there’s any shame in it. He’s put the pride back in avarice.”

“wealthy and successful men must bear the covetous resentment of less industrious people. Their lurid false accusations follow these ideal men of our society right into their homes. It cannot be allowed to continue.”

“You’re quoting from the murderer’s newspaper. You realize that, don’t you?”

Eventually Willa mommed up and did the deed, reaching in with a teaspoon, nervously transferring

“Pine box with a body inside, no preservatives. That’s how most of these people went down. So now they’re part of those trees. Isn’t that where you want to end up, Mom? In a tree like that?” Willa looked at the oak over their heads. Its trunk was a monument to resilience and its branches to tenderness, touched at their tips with the faint rose color of baby oak leaves. Who would not want to end up in a tree like that?

“The thing is, Mom, the secret of happiness is low expectations.

If you didn’t lose your husband and kids all in one year, smile! You’re ahead of the game.”

Storms we can’t deal with, so many people homeless. Not just homeless but placeless. Cities go underwater and then what? You can’t shelter in place anymore when there isn’t a place.”

“The Middle East and North Africa are almost out of water. Asia’s underwater. Syria is dystopian, Somalia, Bangladesh, dystopian. Everybody’s getting weather that never happened before. Melting permafrost means we’ve got like, a minute to turn this mess around, or else it’s going to stop us.”

never thought I had much of a shot. Especially with Zeke telling me ever since I was born that I’m a pea-brained midget loser. It makes you kind of sober about your prospects.” Willa’s heart constricted at the thought of a daughter incurring damage while she looked the other way.

“A person can succeed and fail at the same time. Maybe letting me down was your way of getting me to be me.”

“Fierce.” Willa nodded. Not that she’d wish quite that on any child. Or the mother involved.

One percent of the brotherhood has their hands on most of the bread. They own the country, their god is the free market, and most people are so unhorrified they won’t even question the system. If it makes a profit, that’s the definition of good. If it grows, you have to stand back and let it. The free market has exactly the same morality as a cancer cell. Even Zeke knows that’s true.”

Without shelter, we stand in daylight, she’d insisted once, and he had thought only of death. Simple man. He might sleep in a bed of cactus thorns or a tree under the stars, but he could choose the company he kept and it would not be this fearful, self-interested mob shut up in airless rooms. They would huddle in their artifice of safety, their heaven would collapse. His would be the forthright march through the downfall.

When a house no longer provided shelter, it turned out to be worth exactly the sum of its parts.

“I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.”

Willa studied the wide-eyed face of this child who expected nothing and mostly got it. She’d had no use for anything Willa ever tried to give her, it seemed. But maybe this. “Sometimes the right thing isn’t a thing but a person.” “And that’s me?” “And that’s you.” *

Unsheltered, I live in daylight. And like the wandering bird I rest in thee.

She’d watched her kids master these first small tasks with an application of effort that seemed superhuman, but of course it only amounted to being human, a story written in genes. First they would stagger, then grow competent, and then forget the difficulty altogether while thinking of other things, and that was survival.

Three illuminating books guided my hand as I wrote: This Changes Everything, by Naomi Klein; The Bridge at the Edge of the World, by James Gustave Speth; and The Book That Changed America, by Randall Fuller.