Earth Day 2026

 

                Mark and I went down to Finley National Wildlife Refuge this morning, leaving even before “we  had a sip of tea!”  We brought bagels and tea in travel mugs and sat at the prairie overlook to eat. Around us, camas bloomed and red winged blackbirds held their morning conversations under a cloudy sky. The air was still and just a bit cool—perfect for April.  It has taken a long while—half my life—to learn to read this landscape nd I spent some time thinking about the difference between the landscapes we were born to and the ones we come to know.

                I was born to New Hampshire and that landscape is in my blood. The hills, the glimpses of sky, the winding roads, and the crazy highways around Boston where I learned to really drive.  I grew up chasing waves along the tideline on Cape Cod, standing in the center of a huge maple tree in late September, staring at the range of color from green, to yellow, to orange, to red and all of the combinations in between. I watched the stars—and encountered skunks—from granite outcroppings in an old field, followed logging roads and stove walls deep into the second growth of old farms, and buried my nose in lilacs in May. I could smell snow on the air before it started and knew the particular silence that comes with a storm in the night. And thunderstorms punctuated the summer days. Houses had square shoulders and faced the street and, by the time I graduated from college, I could date their construction within 25 years.

                When I moved west, I lost all of the knowledge of place. It has taken thirty years—and a much closer application of plant guidebooks and trail maps—for me to learn my way into the Willamette Valley and the Cascade Range. For a long while, facing north, I wanted the ocean to be on my right hand, not my left. I would walk along trails and feel like the deep place was just beyond my grasp. Someday, it said, you will know. I know now. I know where the first fawn lily will bloom near the beaver dam, just where the elk kicked it down the embankment about ten years ago. I know how dry sunlight feels at elevation, while I stare at the mountains over a high lake where I have just plunged into the water to wash away the sweat of the trail. I know when to plant out the greens, and the tomatoes, so that the slugs will not eat them to nubs before they grow. And I know how the light shifts in my classroom which faces north, from mid-day to late afternoon. The huge high skies, the long, long summer evenings, the endless cloudy days of mist and rain are all part of my psyche now.

                It is Earth Week. Today, at Finley, I made some notes on what was blooming, but not a complete plant list. We will do that in two weeks, on May Day, because we walk the same trail and observe its changes every six weeks. I have notes going back 20 odd years scattered through my notebooks. Thoreau did the same thing around Walden Pond, returning to the same spots close to his home to observe and record what he saw there. First blooms, first birds, seasonal changes of all sorts. Scientists now use his notes to track the impacts of climate change; some plants are blooming two weeks earlier than in 1840.                 We see serious changes happening in real time right now—we could trace them back in our own notebooks if we brought them all together.  

                Thoreau—and many other writers—loved their places so much that they chronicled all of their changes. I do the same. And I wonder, can we possibly love our home places enough to make the profoundly difficult changes in our lives needed to slow the impacts of the carbon we have spewed into the atmosphere enough so that my friend the first fawn lily will survive? I do not know.

 

  For the Children

Gary Snyder

The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

stay together
learn the flowers
go light

 

               

Laundromat Love

 

                Mark and I no longer have a washer or drier. We bring our clothes down the street three blocks to the remodeled “eco” Laundromat once a week. It is easier.  

                The house came with an avocado colored workhorse of a washer that got the clothes clean and filled two 50 gallon barrels with  greywater which I pumped out of the basement onto newly planted shrubs. We also had a dryer from the 1950s, which broke down once, was repaired, and broke again. We gave up, bought two new stable drying racks, and put up clotheslines in the yard. No more dryer. When the washing machine gave out after 35 years of service we replaced it with an efficient front loader, which used a third of the water, was not as good at getting the dirt out, and no longer watered my yard. It broke down several times in the next 15 years. The last time, the repairman found the needed part in the back recesses of his van and warned us that there were no more repair parts.  

                When I was 12, I was assigned the household laundry. We had no washing machine, so I loaded up some wooden crates and tugged the clothes a quarter mile down the road to the Laundromat—right by my mother’s business. She very quickly bought me a rolling metal cart just like elderly ladies used for groceries. Clothes, soap, change, and a fat novel—I was ready. While the clothes spun and chugged along, I watched humanity and read, sitting on one of the folding tables. When we added the towels from her beauty shop to the mix, my mother bought a dryer and an old wringer washing machine. I no longer had to haul clothes but worked in our kitchen, washing whites and running them through the wringer, rinsing them in another round of hot water and washing the dark clothes in the rinse water, then put them through the ringer, rinsing, and washing another batch of towels. I found laundry with the old wringer to be deeply satisfying; maybe the danger of nipping a finger or sending a button through the air helped.  Our clothes went on the line; the towels went into the dryer.  

                Over the years, I toggled back and forth between laundry in house and in Laundromat. Even when I used the commercial washers, I often took the wet clothes home to dry. I can load an entire week onto one small folding rack—it is a skill. When I finally got my license, I bought extra socks and underwear so I could put off the trip for two weeks. It was a treat to move into a house with a washer and dryer; we put off laundry for a couple of weeks and loaded the machines while we moved furniture ad books into the house.  We used the laundromat down the street occasionally even when our washer worked. In the middle of the rainy season, it was helpful to wash and dry all of the sheets and towels in one fell swoop, rather than doing them every week and having them hang, limp and sodden, for days to dry in the basement.

So, when the washer died for the third time, Mark loaded the laundry into his bike cart and took it down the street. He came back pleasantly surprised. They have remodeled, he told me, it’s nice. The washers spin the water out of the clothes far better than our home washer. It takes 45 minutes to do the entire wash for the week, rather than running up and down stairs while trying to clean the bathroom and sort through the bills. Mark did a quick calculation and decided it was not worth it to buy a new washer between initial investment, repairs, and energy and water use.  His first chore on Saturday is laundry. He washes and we hang—outside when we can on the folding racks when we cannot. No more fussing. No more repairs. We have come full circle. But, if I take the task on, I want a wire wheeled cart.