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August 16 - August 30, 2024
When my mother is no longer here, I know I will cling to that lovely fragrance of mint and a moisturizer I’ll always associate with beauty and love. I will cling to those summer nights we raced—and yet didn’t race—home. I will try to bang myself back to that Oldsmobile like the lacewings that argue nightly with my porch light bulb, to what my small family was then, not even big enough to call a swarm: one sister, two parents.
And for those unimaginable nights in the future, when I know I’ll miss my mother the most, I will let that jar’s sweet glow serve as a night-light to cool and cut the air for me.
How I wish I could fold inward and shut down and shake off predators with one touch. What a skill, what a thrill that could be: Touch me not on the dance floor, don’t you see my wedding ring? Touch me not in the subway; touch me not on the train, on a plane, in a cab or a limo. Touch me not in a funicular going up the side of a mountain, touch me not on the deck of a cruise ship, touch me not in the green room right before I go onstage, touch me not at the bar while I wait for my to-go order, touch me not at a faculty party, touch me not if you are a visiting writer, touch me not at the post
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And we trusted in the cactus wren, in one who knew how to hollow out a space for itself in a most uninhabitable place.
The narwhal taught me what it was like to see through sound what that boy—someone I would have called my friend until that day—really was.
If only the narwhal could have taught me how to listen for those clicks of connection, that echo reverberating back to me.
Still, I had learned there was more to this flat state than a whirl of wind and yellow brick roads. There were good kids here. Kids who, no matter what they learned from television or their own parents, would still reach out for my hand, for a hug, who would miss me on the playground, the way I loved to hang upside-down from the monkey bars with my knees and yelp at the clouds at my feet.
If a white girl tries to tell you what your brown skin can and cannot wear for makeup, just remember the smile of an axolotl. The best thing to do in that moment is to just smile and smile, even if your smile is thin. The tighter your smile, the tougher you become.
Wild axolotls used to swim in abundance in two particular lakes in Mexico, but there haven’t been any documented cases of finding wild axolotls since 2013.
But nature has a way of giving us a heads-up to stand back and admire them at a distance or behind glass—an axolotl’s forelegs don’t just end with sweet millennial pink stars; they are claws designed to help the axolotl eat meat. And when it eats—what a wild mess—when it gathers a tangle of bloodworms into its mouth, you will understand how a galaxy
first learns to spin in the dark, and how it begins to grow and grow.
When I say this, perhaps, you might think of the delightfully named Michigan J. Frog from the old Looney Tunes cartoons. Michigan J. wore a top hat and carried a cane, sang “Hello! Ma Baby,” and only danced when people weren’t watching. And boy did he ever dance—kicking that leg out with more vim and vigor than any can-can girl.
Many herpetologists fear “unnamed extinctions,” meaning that more kinds of dancing frogs might become extinct before they’ve even had a chance to be discovered. And to lose them would be would be no small disaster—we’d lose their unique connections to eighty-five million years of evolutionary history.
I wished I was a vampire squid the most when I was the new girl in high school.
Oh, I didn’t finish high school like that, swimming in darkness.
know it sounds incredibly precious, but these friends made me believe the mantra, “If one of us does well, we all do well.” They were generous with their support. Playing it cool was boring. They were my kinfolk, my people—many of whom I’m still friends with today, though we’ve scattered across the country, spilling out in different directions as fast as we could once we’d tossed our graduation caps in the air.
I emerged from my cephalopod year, exited my midnight zone. But I’m grateful for my time there. If not for that shadow year, how would I know how to search the faces of my own students? Or to drop everything and check in, really check, with each of my sons when they come home from school, to make sure they are having a good time and feel safe?
If you could smell the wind off the wings of an ecstatic, teeny bat—if you could smell banana leaves drooping low and modest into the ruddy soil—if you could inhale clouds whirring so fast across the sky—that is what monsoon rain smells like.
The southwest monsoon etches metallic rivers such as the Periyar and the Bharathapuzha even deeper and wider, as they flow westward from the rugged Western Ghats, losing themselves in milky conversation in the deep backwaters, and finally depart into the Arabian Sea. At water’s edge, coconut trees swoop and tangle low. From a distant bridge, the horizon is nothing but green stars.
Empty rice sacks are tied together to make roofs for their families’ huts. In the early mornings and afternoons, when the rains fall heavy and sure with the scent of bat wing, I wonder how they keep dry.
Most people here cook outdoors, and neighbors find ways to share their bounty with others less fortunate. Whole households—distant aunts and uncles, maids, drivers, dogs, peacocks, the family cow—lie down for a sweet afternoon nap and wait for the rain to subside so the evening meal can be prepared. Even if the family still feels a bit damp, they are sated and pleased, their bellies full.
When I was single, the corpse flower was a way to help clear out the sleaze, the unsavory, the unpleasant—the weeds—of the dating world.
Based upon his reaction, I could tell immediately whether there’d be a second date, or if I’d be ghosting him soon.
When the two rings of citrus-colored flowers fully bloom and the giant meat-skirt of the inflorescence unfolds, the spadix’s temperature approaches that of a healthy human body, one of the only times this happens in the plant world.
Just last week, I read how trees “speak” to each other underground, how they let out warnings of toxins or deforestation. Trees have also been known to form alliances and “friendships” through fungal networks. All of these findings are still new, but I’m in love with the idea that plants have a temperature, that they can run warm and cold when they need to, that they can send signals to species who will help them, not harm them.
After that first visit in Wisconsin, I spent three years tracking blooming corpse flowers all over the world, and in that time, only one man out of dozens—one—didn’t blanch at my description of this incredible plant or disparage my enthusiasm. Only one man didn’t wince when I said the word inflorescence.
I knew he wasn’t joking when he said he’d go anywhere with me, and that he meant it. I’d met my match.
This was a man who’d be happy when I bloomed.
One year prior, dressed in white, I’d walked down the aisle toward this man, and the look he’d given me then is the same he gave me when I asked for the bug salve or told him I needed an aspirin: tenderness.
Finally, bravely, my husband poked his head outside and saw the whole scene from the light of the lanterns lit by the boatmen who were already squatting ashore by their own fire and eating their dinners.
Of course! Bonnet macaques were laughing at us from the trees along the shore.
The thunk we’d heard was a rather obese wildcat that had chased them away and was now guarding our boat from the roof, refusing to move. It seemed to lie in repose, like Caesar reclining on a chaise lounge, awaiting a snack of grapes.
My friend, you have not known true humility until you’ve tried to explain to seasoned boatmen that you might be too scared to eat because you think bonnet macaques will attack you. When they finally understood our concerns, the boatmen first looked at each other, then at the bonnet macaques, and finally busted out laughing. Soon Dustin and I were laughing too, and then, to top it off, the macaques started laughing even louder than all of us put together!
Bonnet macaques reminded me how good it felt to laugh, to keep laughing in love. To make my love laugh. To let my laughter be from a place of love.
But at the last possible moment before I thought she would crash into me, the whale shark sank just low enough to not touch me at all, though her dorsal fins almost brushed up against the belly of my wetsuit. If I’d wanted to, I could have reached down and petted her spotted back when the dive master wasn’t looking, but I was too terrified to do anything but float, lifting my belly and curving my back as far up as it would let me as I tried to get out of the shark’s way.
The shark repeated her close encounters with me several more times during my snorkel session, even though there were five other snorkelers and two dive masters in the tank. Each time, I watched her giant eyeball, curious as a spaniel’s, turn toward my mask. Very rare to happen at all, let alone to the same person, said the dive master.
In my mother’s homeland of the Philippines, whale sharks occupy a prominent place in folklore. One of my favorite fairy tales about the whale shark describes the origin of the species, beginning with a greedy teen named Kablay.
But Kablay held tight to his coins and his coins held him. He held them so tight, they pressed into his body and left white spots, one after another, until his whole back was dotted. Kablay’s legs shrank into fins, his mouth became a small cave, and the bubbles that popped from it were silver.
And because he loved his coins so much and did not want to part with them, his legs shrank into fins until he turned into a whale shark.
Even though I spent almost a year studying whale sharks on my sabbatical, I wasn’t prepared for the sheer size of one.
I had fulfilled a life’s dream, but I couldn’t shake my guilt and dread for a long time after. My son could have been motherless. My husband, a widower. And I certainly felt sorry for the sharks.
Perhaps the reason the potoo leads a motionless, mainly solitary life is to balance its audacious call. There is a time for stillness, but who hasn’t also wanted to scream with delight at being outdoors? To simply announce themselves and say, I’m here, I exist?
I learned how to be still from watching birds. If I wanted to see them, I had to mimic their stillness, to move slow in a world that wishes us brown girls to be fast.
Birds have always been an easy audience for me. And I hope I’ve been an easy, if confusing, audience for them, with my paltry “replies.”
I’m certain it’s not any magic in my mouth, no special twist of tongue that only I have unlocked. But I think it’s the quiet way you settle into the crook of a tree trunk, the still and slowdown of your heart in a world that wants us to be quick and to move onto the next thing.
In this liminal winter-into-spring time, orange dots weigh heavy in the branches along most highways. You can almost imagine someone is throwing orange confetti as you zoom past in your car.
After my kids could finally eat solid foods, one of her greatest pleasures was hand-feeding them slices of fresh citrus—all the white threads lovingly pulled off for a sweet bite. Her grandsons would waddle over to her, clap their hands, sometimes even dance a jig in the middle of the kitchen before squawking and chirping for another bit of “onge.”
When they were small, and I had to sternly remind them it was past their bedtime or forbid them from eating too many cookies, they used to tell me: No, no—I go to Foda! Foda—Florida—the place where grandparents let them eat just about anything they could fit in their little bellies.
When daily news seems to bring forth another fresh grief—more children killed, the Amazon rainforest ablaze for weeks—I think of this orange, its sweetness and the smiles it brings to so many families. For the daily tragedies, I try to do what I can to help—donate money, gather bathroom supplies—but my heart longs for a place of tenderness. Where people offer each other, offer strangers, a fresh globe of fruit.
A dead octopus turns lavender, like the sky over the Aegean just before the stars appear.
