The Last Word On Nothing

The other day I drove to the grocery store, opened the trunk to get out my shopping bags, and this cherry fell out.

At my boyfriend’s house, a couple of beautiful ornamental cherries overhang the parking area. And this little fruit availed itself of my 2012 Prius as a dispersal method.

I don’t think this was a very effective dispersal method. If the cherry had asked me, I would have recommended one of the birds or squirrels that roam around the branches; they at least might have dropped its pit onto some dirt.

On the other hand, my car did carry the cherry all the way out to the suburbs. It’s obviously not going to germinate in the Trader Joe’s parking lot, but the next rain – and we’ve had no shortage of rain in the mid-Atlantic this spring – could wash it downhill, a few hundred feet to the ravine where the Northwest Branch of the Anacostia River runs. That’s a good place for cherries – they bloom early in spring, explosions of pink and white among the tall gray trunks.

I was so taken with this hitchhiking drupe that not only did I not lock the car, but I failed to notice that I didn’t have my keys until I finished my shopping, got back to the car, and couldn’t find them in my purse or any of my pockets. So in addition to getting itself carried to the ‘burbs, this fruit could have gotten my car stolen. Huh.

Ok, cherry. You do you. You disperse any way you want. Thanks for choosing me as your ride.

Photo: Helen Fields, obviously

Here’s a time capsule. I wrote this in 2011, before flying – along with everything else – felt like it was getting more dangerous. One thing I definitely don’t think we will ever experience again is the joy of flying on a mostly empty plane.

It’s not every day that a flight is delayed because there are too few people on board. But, blame Will and Kate, Brits just weren’t flying out of London last Friday. As a result, the Virgin Atlantic A340-600 called Ladybird was carrying only 112 of her usual 380 passengers.

So before we could take off, we had to play a little game of musical chairs. This was done to balance out the plane. Rows 37-40 were blocked off so no one could sit in them. A lady from a middle section was asked to move next to me over on the right side of the plane, and similar reconfigurations took place all over economy. (A flight attendant confirmed my suspicion that no Upper Class passengers were made to move from their pods.) Everyone was free to prowl around the cabin and claim the empty rows once we reached cruising altitude, but the seat distribution had to be exact for takeoff and landing.

The culprit? Turbulence. At cruising altitude, it’s no big deal: Planes can withstand rollercoaster altitude drops that leave their passengers banged up and surfing a sea of vomit. But at takeoff and landing, an unbalanced plane makes things dicey. It’s easier to navigate an empty or even an overweight plane through liftoff turbulence than to do the same for a sparsely populated plane.

To balance the plane, the crew tries to distribute the weight of the passengers, so that the plane’s center of gravity is proper. Recently this practice led to a dustup when an overweight passenger was asked to move to the back of the plane to balance the load.

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God, I love dogs. That’s why recently I started volunteering at a facility where dogs from the very worst conditions around the world are brought for rehab and prep for adoption. It’s run by the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), and it’s in a warehouse at a Maryland address not widely known, as it’s not for public consumption. That’s for good reason: These are often the roughest of the rough, animals at death’s door, dogs that have been hoarded, chained up and abandoned, forced to fight, or nabbed and caged to be sold at meat markets. If they get rescued and shipped from wherever to this place to start anew, they are incredibly lucky.

I fantasized when signing on for this gig that I’d sweep into this warehouse of tragic histories and dog-whisper my way into the animals’ hearts, gently stroking away their fears and filling them with love. No matter how poorly a human treated them before, I’d teach them that people aren’t all bad, and that it was all going to be okay. How rewarding that would be!

In fact, not only is there no hugging and kissing the pups, and no rubbing their bellies and scratching their ears, there is no squatting down to sweet talk them nor even reaching out a hand to be sniffed. I’m really not supposed to touch the dogs at all. It kills me.

Irradiate maize, and it will begin frantically shuffling its chromosomes. Starve E.coli and it will accelerate its mutation rate. Many organisms have this response to stress. They throw the wildest possibilities at the wall to see what might stick, which is to say, what strange version of themselves might survive. They create disorder that might restore order.

From a chaotic disk of gas, a planet forms and migrates into a stable orbit. Twin moons are brought into resonance. For every turn Enceladus takes around Saturn, Dione takes two. Tidal interactions with the planet keep this ratio steady. Disorder has coalesced into order.

A group of Oxford professors have undertaken to bring these types of phenomena together. In a series of lectures and a book, they explored from fields as diverse as musicology, physics and group theory the symmetry in the universe, especially that between order and disorder. Despite some excitement that they might be approaching a grand theory of everything, the results are loosely connected and, so far, half baked, but it’s the kind of half-baked that reminds you how good cookie dough tastes. It’s what you might imagine goes on at a university until you actually work at one.

This post first ran in April 2019. As I get ready to go on maternity leave, I’m struck by how many things, large and small, had to go right for the tentative desires I felt five years ago — for a garden, and maybe even a family — to materialize. It’s been a messy and chaotic period, full of setbacks and delays, wildfires and plagues. But on this day in early May of 2024, I can see rows of lettuce and kale and snapdragons and native wildflowers out my kitchen window, and even a Cecile Bruner climbing rose, as yet uneaten by the deer or aphids. And yes, summer is coming, and with it, a baby. But I’m less afraid of summers (and babies) than I used to be.

Summer is coming. In a few months the foothills surrounding my home will turn blonde, then grey. Streams will dwindle, then peter out. After fire season begins, everything will be covered in ash.

That’s the reality of summer in the Sierra Nevada foothills these days. But right now it’s spring, and what a spring. The mountains are loaded with snow and the rivers are running high. It looks like someone scribbled on the hills with a neon green highlighter. And the flowers, oh the flowers are as good as they get, entire hillsides glazed with golden poppies and shooting stars.

I celebrated the spring bounty last weekend by taking a painting class from an artist named Andie Thrams. Andie’s densely layered watercolors have always felt like home to me, probably because she works not far from the house where I grew up. Her work captures ecological niches in exquisite detail, spanning from the tangled grey pine forests of the Sierra Nevada to the coastal rainforests of Alaska.

For me, Andie’s paintings evoke the smell of pine sap, the feeling of running my fingers along smooth madrone bark and pressing my nose to wet moss. When I lived far away, just looking at Andie’s paintings made me homesick. So when I saw that she was offering a painting workshop, I signed up.