21st Century

This past bad Saturday I went to my cousin Ginny's home for supper.  I have been to her place many times over the six years she has lived in a community-style tract where the houses all look alike, all white, all the same freaking weeping cherry trees out front.  Now, cover them with two feet of snow and guess what.  I couldn't remember which house it was, and furthermore, have no memory of house number.  I don't send her letters other than a once a year card or two, nor do I have to remember her phone number as you just push one button to connect, and the day was sad as it was.  The phone I had with me didn't have her number catalogued, so what the hell do I do?  I called my son in Washington, DC.

He went online to look up her address and phone number for me while I was waiting in the car as denizens of the Eep peered at me from behind their all-the-same curtains.  Sidenote: my cousin actually received a letter from the Association regarding her choice of curtain for the window facing the open desolate field of teasels and dead Queen Anne's Lace across the highway where the speed limit is 45 mph.  Who has time to look at curtains when you are traveling 66 feet per second?  She had made the curtains from fabric with a large, translucent, green leaf design that cheers the room by lending a garden sort of atmosphere, which is what she yearned for.  The curtains are still hanging.

Bri found the address information and I drove up maybe six houses on the left, full of business about the technology that I just successfully employed.  Forgot, completely forgot, that I had Internet capabilities as well, even on my Tracfone.  No matter, it worked out and I am glad to have these tools.  I wonder that hand-cranked energy will become more available as we move forward, to restore battery power in our gadgets.  There are now crank radios that have cell phone ports, as well as backpacks with solar panels that let you charge as you walk in light.  Good ideas, I think.

But today something came in the mail as old as God.  I had ordered two, a Voluta magnifica and a Neptunea intersculpta from a navy fellow who took up shell collecting when he was stationed in Japan and who continues to deal in mollusks.  These whorls of sturdy architecture enchant me.  Just think how clever to develop outside protection from predators wanting to make dinner of you. Tiny, mineralized shells tentatively appear in the fossil record 530 million years ago, and have developed either into the  columelliform of the univalves, or into the lamellibranch family of hinged bivalves.

Who else was so smart?  Insects, crustaceans, arthropods, diatoms; the top half of a turtle, the plates of a pangolin, and the chitin found in mushrooms. Hermit crabs must steal an exoskeleton to set up house, and men in elaborate plate armor have shone forth since the early 13th century, till gunpowder arrived in the 16th.  Next to a smartphone, so what?  I'll tell you what.

Technology is developing intricate ways in finding solutions for the mass extinctions that are happening at a critical rate; it is the most crucial component to reviving our oceans and allowing the viable species to recover.  I read last week that oysters, for heaven's sake, are functionally extinct in the wild.  The BP oil spill wiped out about half of the oyster beds that were left in the Gulf of Mexico, and considering that North America has the most of what's remaining of wild oysters, we humans are in trouble probably more than the oysters.


"O Oysters," said the Carpenter,
"You've had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?'
But answer came there none--
And this was scarcely odd, because
They'd eaten every one.  Lewis Carroll

Sustainable methods through technology.  It will happen.  You help, too.   Take care of garbage and try not to make as much of it.  We are the little people, but the big corporations could give a willysnoot, so it's up to us at the moment.

Today was a warm winter day that melted drifts down, revealing lost birdseed, papers, and mittens.  A wind is supposed to come in, with fresh snow and face it, we are still in the throes of winter regardless of what Uncle Groundhog's big behind thinks.  Sleep well, sleep well in your beds and hope the oysters do also; tuck into that space between sleep and dreams and travel over salt and brine, slip into the depths, visit our first us under layers of cold liquid blue.  They are us as we are them, live your oyster days between two hard shells of mineral calcite, throw out a pearl now and then.  Salt mother, water, life.  Sleep.