When I started this post, we’d just gotten to the dog days. Now it’s October. So much has happened in such a short time I can’t process fast enough to come up with thoughts so I don’t write at all. We’ve been in the dog days, getting you (and me) ready for kindergarten.
It started out a hot and slow moving summer. In July we visited Michigan and went to the shipwreck museum on Lake Superior, even though now your interest is waning on the topic we still had fun, and you wear your Edmund Fitzgerald t-shirt pretty much everywhere. Being back, eating cherries, row-boating on the lake at dusk, I always always think of moving, for the summer anyway, but maybe forever. Why not? It’s beautiful. Why I left – closing factories, all the smart kids leaving for better jobs somewhere else, the small mindset of the ones who stayed. In college, driving through the empty streets of downtown Detroit, you had to roll through stop signs to avoid getting carjacked on your way to an all-night party in an empty downtown department store. When we got back to Austin, a film about the Detroit uprising had just come out. It wasn’t great but it made me think more about Michigan, social justice, and the way the engines of change work in a circular motion. Coming back around and around and around. Fifty years ago, we had Detroit, this summer we had Charlottesville, where a white supremist protest turned violent and the government did nothing, siding with the haters.
A week later, August 21, a total eclipse crossed the middle American landscape. You watched it on the internet because all of the eclipse glasses on Amazon turned out to be faulty, I rode my bike to Barton Springs and caught it in the shadows of pecan leaves on concrete. Two days later, Hurricane Harvey dropped 50 inches of rain on Houston in 3 days, stranding people all along the Texas coast in the streets and homes, destroying infrastructure and causing chemical plants to explode. The flooding lasted for days. Another week, Hurricane Irma, a storm as wide as Florida, ripped through the state. And another two weeks, Hurricane Maria destroyed Puerto Rico, knocking out power completely. A huge earthquake leveled buildings in Mexico City a few days later, and a shooter in Las Vegas killed over 50 people on September 30. The second week of October, wildfires in Northern California leveled homes and farms and wineries. I am not including all the news, just the apocalyptic lowlights. And I’m not saying it has to do with the eclipse. Just a coincidence, a bookend. Cycles within cycles.
Today it’s October 21 and I am in LA for a landscape architecture conference, and have met people from Houston and Northern California and heard stories and all of this is on everyone’s mind but also, how do we fix it. How do we design cities to store water and grow food and provide jobs and community and economic justice? It feels overwhelming and hard to plug in. I don’t know how to engage with it and make sure you’re signed up for little league and live my own meaningful life all at the same time. But I have to, somehow. It’s what’s required. I don’t want this world for you or anyone, 50 years from now.
And then there’s you, five-and-a-half, getting used to kindergarten. The big school with all the buildings and teachers and rules and permission slips. Bouncing out of the car every morning so you have a minute to feed the bunnies blades of grass on the way to class. You are magic, the opposite of everything else.
Little Bug 