Spinster

Yesterday when I was walking home from work, exhausted and hungover (thanks, pub night and 4 hours of sleep!), it started snowing. It’s been pretty cold here lately and it’s certainly snowed a few times in the past week, but this time there were individual snowflakes. Being from Miami and having lived in Portland, OR, where it doesn’t snow that often, I think I’ve seen actual snowflakes -the picture-perfect kind- maybe 3 times in my life: once in Georgia, once in Colorado, and once here.

As I was walking home, the flakes landed on my jacket and my gloved hands, which I was holding out in front of me like mitts to catch the snow. It was so quiet: everything was still, there was no traffic in my residential neighborhood, and I was the only one out. I don’t often have moments where everything seems perfect and where I can marvel at the world, but that was certainly one of them. Every single snowflake was perfectly formed and I had to stop walking so I could get a better look at them. If I held up my hands in the right way, so that the flakes were in the light, I was able to see all of the patterns on each one: the soft, feathery ones; the remarkably symmetrical, quintessential snowflake; the simple ones; the complex ones.

It’s moments like those (and I find that they come unexpectedly, when I’m walking along the narrow beach on the Oregon coast in February and the sun is shining and there’s no one around for miles; or when I’m snorkeling in the Keys and there are schools of silvery fish below me and in front of me and behind me; or when I’m in the Everglades on a “winter” day and I see, for the first time in my life, a roseate spoonbill in flight), that I know how important the natural world is; and how important it is to feel part of it, if only fleetingly. Usually, those moments also make me feel sad, knowing that there will come a day when snorkeling in the Keys will turn up only bleached, dead coral, and there won’t be any more roseate spoonbills in the Everglades because there won’t be any more Everglades.

I guess that the reality of global warming and the catastrophes that come with it have finally penetrated this nation’s consciousness; I can’t say the same for my own. But I hope that eventually Americans will realize that there is so much about the natural world that is infinitely more valuable and interesting than money and industry and “progress.” And that once an entire ecosystem is gone, we have lost something indescribably beautiful, and that our actions are irreversible and irrevocable and we can’t do anything to get it back once we finally wake up and understand how important it really was.

P.S. Lorien wants everyone to know that she finished her mom’s sweater and is blocking it. And she touches it all the time.