This post first ran in 2021, but I’ve been thinking of it a lot lately — ever since a new family moved into my friend Mona’s house. Mona lived in my neighborhood and we walked our dogs together most mornings. She died of cancer in 2017, and I still think of her every time I pass by her house, which is every time I leave my house. I miss her on a daily basis. The new family in her house has somehow made me miss her more, because I have such a strong impulse to want to tell her about the news. Seven years after her departure, I’m still wanting to share things with her on a weekly basis, and it hurts so much that she’s not here for it.
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On the morning my friend Kristina died, I listened and re-listened to the last voice mail she left me. I needed to hear her voice, and the mundaneness of her 35 second message was comforting. She was sorry she’d missed my call. She’d been out for a walk. She was planning a bike ride tomorrow but would call me again before that. She really wanted to connect.
I am notoriously terrible about clearing out my voice mails. I can’t bear to erase them. I have a habit of keeping at least one at all times from the people I love most. The content of the message isn’t important. It’s that I can hear their voice, catch them in the midst of ordinary life, before they are dead. I’ve learned that you never know when someone will be dead.
I once heard a story about a phone booth in Japan where people who lost friends and family in the 2011 tsunami and earthquake go to talk to their lost loved ones. I would use a phone booth like that.
I still occasionally listen to the voice mail I saved from my friend Mona before she died several years ago. I have heard her say that she’s just returned from Tai Chi class dozens of times. In the months after she died, I also texted her more than once. Sometimes I would forget, if only for a split second, that she was dead and feel compelled to follow through on my impulse to tell her something on my mind. Other times, I just needed to pretend for a moment that she wasn’t really gone.
When I got the news that Kristina had died, I had just placed a letter to her in my mailbox. A few days earlier, a loved one had sent a message out saying that Kristina was turning inward and it was now best to send wishes and love by mail rather than text or phone. This was my second note to her in the previous two weeks, and I’m not sure if she ever read the first. After I received the news that she had passed, I stood on the front porch and stared at the little red flag raised on my mailbox at the end of the driveway. I could not make myself go retrieve the letter.
Early in the pandemic, in the spring of 2020, a neighbor was moving out in a hurry. She and her husband had been living separately for some reason – academia-related? – but suddenly she was able to work from anywhere, so she packed up the baby and left. In the process she gave away all sorts of stuff, from housewares to a freezer full of meat to some very sad little houseplants.
When another neighbor saw the miserable pothos I’d claimed, she took it over, giving it a new pot and a new lease on life. The pothos was miserable no more. With plenty of soil for its roots, it flourished, sitting on the end of the shelf over my desk. It grew into the closet; it grew around the power cords; it grew under the desk drawers and poked its little green shoots out on the other side.
And it found its way into the art that I did during Zoom meetings.
Today I worked at my old desk in my apartment – kind of a rare occasion these days, when my apartment has basically become an expensive storage unit. During a three-hour Zoom meeting, I got to look at this old friend again. It’s a good-looking plant. It could probably use a bigger pot.
Photos: Helen Fields, obviously
P.S. This isn’t the first LWON about a pothos!
Last autumn, Microsoft made a subtle change to its Excel spreadsheets, one which flew under the radar for normal mortals. Unlike many other software tweaks, this one made it easier to stop the software automating certain tasks. Specifically, its tendency to automatically convert input into dates. One major reason for the change was the havoc this automation had wreaked on geneticists needing to populate Excel with gene names like MARCH 1 and SEPT1. “Stop helping me,” one commenter pleaded in the Verge writeup: “Never automate anything without providing an easily discoverable means to de-automate it.” From your lips to god’s ear, mate.
This change from Microsoft was a welcome olive branch, as the human genome has had more than enough problems getting its naming conventions into the 21st century. Here’s my writeup about that from a couple of years ago.
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Look, no one is trying to get a dick joke into the human genome. If it happens, it won’t be by design. No one even really thought it was a possibility until the late 1990s, when the physical chemistry professor Paul W. May was having a beer with some other science friends and they got around to talking about funny molecules. Everyone knew about the ring-shaped molecule called Arsole. It didn’t take long to conjure up several more funny science terms. May began to collect these, and soon had so many that he turned the collection into a blog. By 2008 the blog had become a book. (NB: both blog and book are written in Comic Sans. And he commits to the bit. Main text, table of contents, acknowledgments, and references – all Comic Sans. References!) The book has a whole separate section on gene names, and here you will find some of the spiciest names in science. By the time the book was published, however, some of them were already out of date – the Human Genome Nomenclature Committee had begun to take a keen interest in what geneticists were calling their new genes, and by 2006 had put the kibosh on 10 names deemed the most offensive. But if they thought their work was done, they didn’t know how much stranger it could get.
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I was in Assateague, Virginia, some weeks back, doing the summer beach thing. The wild horses, standing hoof-deep in the chilly saltwash, were lovely, as they always are. They’re one of the truly special things about this national seashore. The horseshoe crabs? Lovely in their own way, I suppose, and definitely special. Especially this one, with its crustacean backpack. The host was deceased, unfortunately, but its riders were still with us, holding on tight.
I knew a few things about horseshoe crabs before spotting this one, including that they’ve been around for more than 400 million years, that they haven’t changed much in that time, and that their blood–which happens to be blue because of a copper-based respiratory pigment called hemocyanin–is used in human medicine. Why/how that last bit? I looked up the details: Scientists discovered a protein in the crab’s blood called limulus amebocyte lysate that clots when it come into contact with endotoxins (toxic bacteria). So the substance can be used as a toxin-detection system that helps ensure vaccines, drugs, and medical devices aren’t contaminated before they’re put inside people.
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This week is the 79th anniversary of two nuclear weapons used on a human populace. In remembrance, I look to the region where the first bomb was set off as a test, less than a month before it was used against the Japanese people.
Where this devastation begins is hard country, Jornada del Muerto, which means journey of the dead. The name came before “Trinity Site,” and was taken for the bones of a horse and rider found there by a Spanish party more than 350 years ago, as if some poor fool and his horse had stumbled into the Book of Revelations.
I can only imagine the test site was chosen for its emptiness. Hardly a soul lives around here even today. Downwinders still pay, and for many, the government that did the deed won’t cover the cost. My family is from a town a hundred miles west, downwind in southern New Mexico. We don’t talk about it.
The basin is now marked with a hot crater half a mile across. An event of such magnitude in human history resonates in all directions through time. In the Pleistocene, the detonation site would have been under a lake, part of a chain of sparkling mirrors, some taking up the whole horizon. The next big basin south is now occupied by an active bombing range, a perfectly flat geography called Ancestral Lake Otero, a place that no longer has a lake. Its once muddy shorelines have produced a litany of Ice Age tracks, Columbian mammoth, big cat, giant ground sloth, human. Now it is barren, nearly lifeless. When the wind blows, the sky turns to zinc.
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I’m not on TikTok, so I had to be told about pregnancy nose. Whereas in the 1960s, women sat down together and discovered the political underpinnings of their personal struggles, now we do things like congregate online and discover, via selfies, phenomena we were never told to expect in ‘What to Expect When You’re Expecting.”
The same hormones that orchestrate a whole new placenta and get the blood flowing there also dilate blood vessels and produce fluid retention elsewhere. It can lead to a giant, unrecognizable nose. Perhaps we didn’t notice before because weight gain can, itself, reshape the face, but taken together on TikTok, it’s clear: pregnancy nose is a thing.
What about the more permanent effects of pregnancy? Our society tends to pathologize these, or rather, to focus on the pathologies that arise. But I wish someone had told me sooner about the coolest permanent change. It happens whether you carry the baby to term or suffer a miscarriage or abortion. It persists for decades, until you die.
You become a chimera.
For as long as a little one and a mother share a body, they are exchanging cells. The fetal cells that circulate in a mother’s blood cross the blood-brain barrier (which is more permeable at that time) and stay in our brains. They don’t just accrete there like so much flotsam, either. They properly differentiate into neurons, colonize the heart and help it beat, and regenerate the liver. Sometimes when they reach a new organ, the baby’s cells fuse with the mothers’.
Studies often look for the clearest indication of this—cells with male chromosomes in women who have had sons—but you can also get those indirectly from an older male sibling, because your mother can pass them back to you in the womb.
The whole idea is just beautiful to me, that both my son and my brother quite literally live in me forever. I find meaning in it. And it makes me wonder what other magic is at work when we bring our ancestors to life, through birth.
This week, a mourning dove has started to build a nest in the walnut tree outside my office window. I see it flying back and forth with twigs in its beak, perching on a piece of webbing, waiting for the right moment to swoop in.
Why is a mourning dove building a nest in August? I’m not sure. I think I once interviewed a researcher who said that mourning doves are “dumb as rocks”–but I can’t remember when, or who.
But it did remind me of a post I wrote in 2016, which was the first time one of my kids was traveling without me. This summer, more fledglings winged away on their own, and there is part of me that always–not worries, exactly, but wonders how they could possibly be out in the world, so far away. Sometimes when I’m traveling, I feel like this, too–weightless and winged, granite replacing grey matter, unable to stop turning my head to look at what’s behind me.
Then, yesterday, I saw a crow start to harass one of the neighborhood doves. After a moment, the dove turned and chased the crow off into the trees. The dove returned, cooing contentedly. The crow did not.
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We came back from vacation earlier this month to find that someone else had moved in. I didn’t realize it at first—the house seemed just as we had left it, and we were busy emptying the car and starting the laundry and repopulating the house with the things we’d taken with us.
It was later, when two of the boys were in the bathtub, that I saw piles of bird poop around the floor in the dining room. The dining room is a small space underneath a greenhouse window, and it’s always attracted birds. I froze, wondering if I’d find a bird huddled in the corner. When I didn’t hear anything, I started looking around for a dead bird. I wanted to find it before the kids did. Their toys are in this greenhouse room, too, and I imagined the unhappy surprise of finding a still, small creature when you’re reaching for a wooden train track.
I crouched down to look closer. And that’s when I saw the tiny white ball beneath the table.
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