She asks me, Will we survive this?
I read that the earth is losing its glow. That we’re now in an age of icequakes. Sea lions are dying from domoic acid, a powerful neurotoxin. A government agency closes Chinook salmon fishing on the West Coast because of low populations of fish returning to California rivers. My phone beeps that the earth will be reaching a critical warming threshold by the early 2030s.
I don’t open the story.
This is not apathy.
My daughter is frightened at night that something will happen to me, so she arrives to my dark room, crawls into my bed, and sleeps next to me, her breath modest and untroubled as our bodies regulate in their intimacy. At 12, she is all hormonal crushes, makeup, and friendship drama, but she lives with a low-level anxiety earned through a pandemic, war, and a warming earth. I know this origin story. Despite this, she dreams of what her life will grow to be. We laugh one day that Alexa would probably like to retire into a meadow with wildflowers, stop giving directions or guidance to all the bewildering humans at her control, but this is just a fantasy for some nostalgic past that won’t be. One where artificial intelligence is only a theory.
As antidote, I curate on postcards what common beauties I see in a day.
How the sky explodes into gray during spring storms, the mountains crested with folds of white, and the Oregon rivers in spring bursting with debris and velocity. This temporary illusion of beauty is part of our greater festival of love.
What I want to know: How can you not love all of this—the stately beak of a crow, the unwieldy stutter of a snail, the quiet hush of a forest under snow?
There are beautiful facts I learn: Whales have clans and make music. Mushrooms will save the world if we grow them next to trees. Owls have special feathers that break down turbulence creating silent flight. A group of lemurs is called a conspiracy. Dragonflies will feign their death when they don’t want to have sex.
Even so, my daughter walks home from the bus stop on a March afternoon and tells me she’s sad. She has learned that Biden has signed the Willow Project into law opening drilling in Alaska. I am not surprised. I do not feel grief. I don’t feel anything so desensitized to the constant barrage of oil drilling, extractive capitalism, climate change, massive extinctions.
What about all the animals? she asks. What will happen to them?
I want to have children, she says, though I probably shouldn’t.
She looks at me, and says, I want to travel.
She sits at the bar eating chips and I don’t say anything except, Yes, it’s sad.
I don’t and can’t comfort her. What future exists for her?
And my son: kind-hearted for 15, aware of the dangers of his privilege, participating in the world with a gentleness and humor, believing in his mother. When he wakes, he jokes to me about the apocalypse, the smoke, and N95 respirators, but I know in his special heart, brave and beautiful, he fears what lies ahead for him. He just doesn’t say it.
We know the facts between us, in the things we don’t say to each other.
He likes his friends and delicious food and sleep and he’s discovering what makes him happy, this teenager who is transforming before me, who I hope will become a leader, a diplomat, his fairness guiding him forward. He likes to place his head on my shoulder, still, and likes to keep to himself too. He also wants a puppy. This has something to do with trust in a future. What more can I do for my children besides that small gesture of love? Take them to wild places. Teach them how to make good choices. Share generosity. Facilitate political learning. Get them a dog.
Ava says she’ll become a real estate agent and move to Ipswich, Massachusetts, where she’ll have two children who will ride their bikes to the docks and the shore in the summer. If there is a shore to be seen. I’ll have a golden retriever, she says. She looks up real estate on Zillow while we watch Yellowstone on Netflix, and I’m nostalgic, again, for cowboys, a wide sky in the big country, and her ten-year-old queerness. Recently, I found her near the trashcan about to throw her rainbow flag into the bin. I told her I’d keep it. I’d hang it out front our new house.
She said, I don’t have to be constantly flying my LGBTQ everything, Mom.
But you do, I say.
She says, I know it’s important for you.
Yes, I like queer things, I reply.
On another day, Ava and I eat salmon, cauliflower, spinach salad, and she asks me if I know about the war in Ukraine. I say yes. She says she heard about it on TikTok. I ask if they are talking about it in school. She says no. I ask her what she knows. I ask her if she’s scared.
She says, Yes, I haven’t even had my first kiss.
I watch an art documentary on extractive industries and the filmmakers apply cocoons and moths as metaphor, urging us to transform our destructive exteriors. We can be beautiful. We can find new conditions in which to exist, expressing ourselves in mutuality, perhaps like an alligator with butterflies skimming over the backs of the lizard’s scutes.
Ava writes a poem about anti-patriotism. She makes it rhyme and her substitute teacher tells her it’s inappropriate. She reads it to me in the car, and I laugh at its cleverness. I tell her to ignore the substitute, that I love her for this insightful lyric brought to her fifth-grade class at the outdoor school where still, sometimes, at night, in the yard, with the stars a hush, and the moon just tilted, a black bear meanders through the field just next to the soccer nets and it isn’t so far away—
These details of my daughter are just as beautiful as the Palos Verdes blue butterfly, pitching away in the southern coastal scrub of Los Angeles. I tell her of this place where her mother grew up, a dry beautiful place, as we walk to the bakery in town and choose muffins and cinnamon rolls to share, drive to Goodwill and sort through the racks of belts and sweaters and funny backpacks searching for our next favorite item, like her see-through alligator shirt reminiscent of Chevy Chase or Bill Murray. Later, we watch the adaptation of Little Women curled up in blankets when it’s raining outside and sip hot tea rich with ginger and lemon, comment on how we’d love to be Jo and write stories and dream up plays in attics. I rest with her when she’s sad and she tells me she feels insecure, or feels nervous about school, or can’t wait to perform as Wendy in Peter Pan. She shows me TikToks of queer girls lip syncing to pop songs and then curates her Pinterest boards with what she calls “Fall Vibes,” Girl in Red on the speaker.
I have faith in her generosity.
She asks me, Will we survive this?
I tell her we must live life in growing orbits, as Rilke advised.
So we do.
Read “Earth and Motherhood, Part I” appearing in Oregon Humanities.
Melissa Matthewson is the author of a memoir-in-essays, Tracing the Desire Line, from Split/Lip Press (2019). Her essays have appeared in AEON, Literary Hub, Guernica, Oregon Humanities, DIAGRAM, Catapult, Sweet Lit, American Literary Review, The Rumpus, and Longreads, among others. She lives and writes in southwestern Oregon and teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Eastern Oregon University.
Read “Fall, or Falling,” prose and photographs by Melissa Matthewson also appearing in Terrain.org.
Header photo of Palos Verdes blue butterfly by Michael Hannigan, courtesy Shutterstock.
