EARTH ISLAND JOURNAL • SPRING 2020 53slimy, brown tomato plants. The next day though, it warms
up. “I’m going to plant the garlic,” I tell my husband. Instead,
I sleep and feed the baby.
Several days pass this way. Finally, I put on gloves. I take
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outside. Everything is brown, except for the sky, which is gray.
The yard is soggy from too much rain. I kneel down beside
the bed that last summer had lettuce. Peeling apart the cloves,
I stick each one face up into the ground. It’s wet and frozen
in places but still workable. I know I don’t have much time to
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become muddy and wet. I continue this way, taking the cloves
and pushing them into crooked rows. I have no idea whether
it is too late to plant garlic or not, but it feels good to dig.
My back aches from the constant breastfeeding. I stand up,
clasping my muddy hands, and lean one way, then the other.
I look at the branches of the oak trees, dark against the gray
sky.
M
ONTHS LATER, WE ARE SITTING IN THE KITCHEN.
The woodstove is throwing light out into the room as
the snow outside turns to rain. I place the baby on a blanket
while I work on getting dinner organized, chopping scallions,
then garlic. I read today that the Greenland Ice Sheet is
rapidly melting. I crack eggs into a bowl to be whisked, putting
the shells into the compost. Icebergs are melting into rivers,
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and realize that I’ve just cracked the egg into the compost bin
and put the shell into my bowl.
Changing states rapidly. The oldest ice in the Greenland
ice sheet is one million years old. It contains enough ice to
raise sea levels 23 feet if it completely melts. Now it is turning
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coasts will be uninhabitable, and mass migrations inland will
begin. I look down at the baby. She stares at the logs burning
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there, breathing through the side of her mouth pressed into
the rug. She seems driven to roll. She is happy on her back,
looking, but then she starts to roll again. She falls back and
starts the roll again. She does not know the outcome. She
knows only to try. Again, and again, and again.
Climate change is destabilizing our present by undermining
our future. I used to feel like I had a rough idea of the future,
because I could extrapolate from the past. The world of my
children will be similar to the world now. Climate change
has changed that. I can no longer envision a future based
on the present. Yet hasn’t it always been that way? We trick
ourselves into thinking our lives are predictable, stable, that
we can depend on certain things, among them, tomorrow.
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cancer next week. The false certainty of tomorrow is a veil we
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that now, not only can I not count on my own life continuing,
but I cannot count on other forms of life continuing. I can no
longer count on the planet to continue, in its current form.
There are moments when it all seems overwhelming.
Frantic nights falling asleep sitting up with the baby, waking at
3 a.m., then 4, then 5. Stealing moments to read and, ideally,
write, during the day. The forests are burning. The ice is melting.
The soils are eroding. The insects are dying. It feels both urgent that
I work and impossible to put my head down and work when
the world out there is fraying. My eyes hurt. My head hurts.
My heart hurts. I can’t think about this anymore.
Here is the terror and the gift. Climate change reminds
us that we cannot know what the days after this day will
bring. It reminds us that each moment is one in a string of
uncertainties. This is the challenge: Can I let go of my need
to know the future and let today be enough? I do not know
what my baby’s world will be like. But I do know that today,
she is learning to roll over. Today, right this very moment, the
garlic cloves that I planted are sprouting up through the soil
in the garden. Tenacious, they reach for the sky.J
UST BEFORE THE BABY IS BORN, Lyman takes me out on
his boat for the morning. We stop for bait, then motor
out into the bay. It is a hot September day. The bay shimmers.
I immediately get seasick and have to sit along the edge of
the boat, looking at the horizon. Every few minutes I stick
my hand into a bucket of seawater and splash my face and
neck. I watch Lyman and a sternman pull traps, circle the
boat around and pull more traps. They glance at me uneasily.
Lyman revs the engine. They twist the rope up and attach it
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which pulls the trap up. They take out the lobsters, throw
them into cones to band later, and pull up the next one. We
do this for a while, then begin heading back in. We are motor-
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monarch? I ask. Sure is, Lyman replies. We watch as it jerks
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above the blue bay.Kate Olson is a PhD Candidate at Boston College and lives with
her family in Maine. Learn more about her multimedia project
documenting lived experiences of climate change in Maine at
http://www.livingchange.blog and follow her on Instagram and Twitter
@livingchangeme.