A. Kendra Greene beautifully reflects on the generations of families growing up in California, our changing climate and way of life, and the experiences and memories that shape us and which we carry within our bodies, wherever we go.
A few years before I had nieces at all, I remember thinking that I felt a shift coming, a kind of tipping point, that already, even in terms of technology, so much had changed so fast that there was about to be too much to explain to someone new to all of it, a child or an alien, and I meant just the part I’d lived through. Even just that, a few decades, was about to be impossible, all of it still recent memory, but simply too much.
It was last summer I first noticed the people I knew in Salt Lake talking about wildfires in the tongue of my West Coast childhood. It happened with locals and transplants alike, in canyons and coffee shops, at a friend’s house in the hills looking across the sweep of the valley. Not only the language, the fact of air quality and containment and evacuation route and how much longer can we stay, but something in the tone, what I can only name a familiarness, the sound of understanding.
More picks from Nautilus
The Gravekeeper’s Paradox
“People want permanent tombstones that also show decay.”
The Last of Their Kind
“Are efforts to resurrect the northern white rhino more technological hubris than genuine conservation?”
When Did I Start Getting Cancer?
“An environmental chemist investigates the origins of her leukemia.”
Scent Makes a Place
“How the desert taught me to smell.”
This Ocean Wave Has Rights Â
“The true meaning of legal protection for nature.”
The Once and Future Woods
“Cathedrals, seed banks, and oaks: How to live in times of change.”
