The Quiet Ones

We're often called 'tough eggs to crack'. Sometimes you turn around with that feeling that you're being watched and, even though we only locked eyes when you turned, the intensity and thoughtfulness might have seemed creepy or invasive. We don't talk much, not because we have nothing to say, but because there's so fucking much to say. Asking us to talk is likely to be met with more silence or some disjointed thought. 

We're not exactly waiting for a prompt, permission to speak. We're not always riddled with anxiety unless we're getting condescending, patronizing or hostile vibes. We get called amenable or down to earth. We're quick to judge but aren't strictly judgemental. We're mistaken as perceivers because we're not aggressive but we often arrive at decisions fast though readjust them just as quickly. We can think you seem like a stuck-up bitch then like you by the end of the night. We seem indecisive at times but it's often because we don't have enough information to make a decision.

Quiet Ones tend to live in the grey. Nothing is wholly good or evil, though we certainly choose sides in the darkest and lightest spots. We're not colorblind, figuratively speaking, Sometimes we're even hypersensitive and it's not just an emotional extremity. Sometimes we hear, see, smell, taste and otherwise sense too well or not at all. We're present but we're somewhere else. We seem like impossible multitaskers but we're more environmental ruminants, able to engage or ignore at random.

We want you to see what we're passionate about but don't press it. When you give us a chance, you might see our potential. We aren't actually selling you anything, we're investing in our dreams. (Semantics. Sorry, not sorry.) We can never hear enough how much you admire our work.

Okay, this isn't some sort of pronoun coming-out, but clearly I fit the bill and many other people mistaken for being quiet do as well. Most people don't actually have a crippling impairment but are instead just looking for an authentic entrance. We're not the ''how bout those Knicks?" people but we're the "I never knew a red wine could be so sweet!" sort. Most quiet people aren't looking for the quick and easy joke, but the hidden gems. We want to see you gazing at the moon and bring up the Chinese moon landing, the first successful attempt... And they're growing cotton up there! If you don't make a face and call us weird, the next question would be whether the government will actually honor all that real estate on the moon that NASA was selling or if there will be land disputes once terraforming happens? And no, it's not always that staggeringly nerdy; sometimes we see carrots on the party platter and remember reading that carrots were originally purple. Okay, that's nerdy too. I'm bad at this...

Point being, my kind aren't apt to leave you feeling our work is predictable. We make the most attentive friends. We're self entertaining and don't tend towards neediness.

Now I definitely sound like I'm selling something. Friends don't let friends blog on no sleep. 

Winter Wonder What Now?

Positive posts on FB are why I still bother with social media. Rainbows, clouds that look like dragons and middle fingers, hilarious animal videos and the wit of my many friends. I don't even hate that when weather hits people clamor to show pictures of the destruction and look for each other and scramble to make sure their animals are comfortable. Like books, the less the posts are attempting to influence or call for sympathy, the more likely I am to allow myself to find those depths for myself.

But this post is about weather. Shit's ridiculous here and in many other places besides. These aren't old gripes but rather new for the Cincinnati I've spent a good chunk of my life in. The trees around here have no idea when to cycle, the bugs multiple in huge numbers and take over when the cold would have taken care of it-- it's unnatural chaos in nature. 

This spring, there were several damning false starts. Flower bulbs shot up almost immediately at the first sign of melt then stopped again. The trees didn't even try. Until they did, suddenly, and we had some of the worst cases of asthma, respiratory distress, the pollen and mold counts were insane. Just tree sperm everywhere and well beyond the usual spring cycle, into summer. It was actually a milder summer than usual and one without the drought of the year before that turned everything shriveled and brown. There was plenty of rain and yet, the tomatoes just didn't grow in abundance. I still pine for the summer like the one where there more tomatoes than we and the thieving squirrels could handle.

Fall? What's fall? We had about two weeks that felt like it. Leaves finally started turning colors and the nights were good for bonfires. Yet there were and are still a lot of green on the trees.

Then winter happened.

Kind of. Not really. We got snain, what the boys and I call the combo of fat snow flakes and rain. We woke up yesterday, at first admiring the fingers of ice dangling everywhere, not really paying much attention to the big downed branch in the front yard that came down while we slept.

We heard a loud crack, what sounded like someone loudly and poorly opening a bag of potato chips and saw another rather large branch come down. I went outside to look and immediately noticed that every tree still burgeoning with still green leaves looked at least ten feet short, drooping with the sheer weight of ice that coated every branch, stem and leaf. I told the boys we'd get a better look when we went outside to go to school and nearly every fifteen minutes another branch went down.

Reports all over the area reported down branches and even huge trunks, split under the weight of weather that trees here just hadn't evolved to handle. Power lines as well. People started to post about not having power, some getting it back after hours, some going on a day or more. We worried about it too. A couple of branches rest right over our power lines and if the rain had kept coating everything where it froze, we'd be among them.

I was already devising a way to keep my tropical fish alive if it came to it. Luckily, our house still gets hot water and the stove still works when the power is out.

Until the tree gets taken down, I can't say I'm not thinking about the what-ifs. All the same, nature used to be an adaptive cycle that wavered but always managed to balance out. These years have been anything but.

It doesn't matter if people believe climate change is real or that we affect it greatly. There are actual studies that can tell you that not believing we are part of the problem is willful ignorance. If you're only going to make an argument for human comfort, then you can't deny that even what is out of our hands is still something we have to clean up then work to solve. When you suspect that something is killing you, are you really that surprised that rather than being cautious at the first sign, it got worse because you waited for all the evidence to came in?

There's enough. We're fucking up a world we have the run of, even though we also have the means to fix it. We're sniping away at insignificant petty shit and the greed, even brought to spotlight, is never really tackled. We all bitch about it. I do too. And maybe we can't win people over, certainly not by being 'passionate' know-it-all assholes at that.

We're attacking each other over the big unknowns, writing off what nature is telling us clear as day. Even though they don't directly correlate to all arguments of climate change. I'm not going to hoard lists here of every natural and unnatural occurrence as a way to make everyone bow to the whims        of the planet. I don't disagree that the earth does go through drastic natural shifts. Yet don't use those as blankets for a shitty carbon footprint. I won't make a case for being efficient. Just don't be the dick trashing your neighborhood and choosing luxury over harmony every time.

Life would suck if we always let moral judgements be public domain. I get that. Yet denial over the evident, the whole ant and the grasshopper dilemma of not doing shit until it's too late? Don't be that guy. I'm sure even if you are, people still love or tolerate you. It's just disgusting to me that someone like that pretends to give a shit about the seed they spread. People who pretend to guard the sanctity of human life and willfully give their progeny a future full of their table scraps.

Whether you plan on putting these things to thought or not, give your children some desire to figure out how to help ecosystems heal at least. Human intervention in nature CAN leave an impact on human progress. No, you don't have to go vegan or live a joyless life of strict discipline to be mindful of your impact. Encourage and reward those who are doing it. Look at the efforts of permaculture farmers, scientists, doctors. You don't have to be the big change to support it.

I know I'm jumping between two topics that could be muddied as far as how much they actually intersect, but when people start diving down the rabbit hole of climate change, they sometimes brush it off as natural, disregarding that human intervention is just as natural. Our methods of self-preservation and progress are a necessary balance. We can build a better life, but not on the garbage of the broken things left half-working. We tidy the space and learn from the mistakes.

Maybe I give my own species too much credit, for what we can do and what we will do. I live a good life, but we all think that too. I know it's useless to get frustrated when the mess you try to avoid is the mess someone else makes. What keeps me happy is doing what I believe is right for me. I don't police those I love and I don't police the planet. I just sincerely hope we will continue to discuss it.

Because these goddamn trees need some boot camp style weather training at the very least.