May looked through her kitchen window at the flourishing landscape they’d created over the previous nine years, intently watching a Bullock’s oriole fledgling learn to fly. Each attempt demonstrated a narrow victory of instinct and physiology over gravity. Though the trajectory of each flight was steadily downward, by god, it was flight! She loved the idea that the maturing gardens and landscape were increasingly attractive to these colorful birds but worried that it was partly the world’s steadily warming climate that had brought them.
Back in late April, she’d joined ranks with other climate activists from all over the world for the People’s Climate March in Washington: tens of thousands of brightly-colored signs splashed raw pride and conviction into the emotional and politically-charged event. Some of the signs were peppered with defiant irony and humor, such as “If 99% of doctors said you were dying, would you believe in science then?” Taunted another irreverent sign, “Keep the Earth clean – it’s not Uranus,” and a third pleaded “Save the Earth – It’s the only planet with dogs.” May’s artfully homemade sign warned, “Respect Existence or Expect Resistance.”
Exactly a month later, the President had stunned billions by announcing that the U.S. would pull out of the historic Paris Climate Accord, agreed upon by all but one other nation in the world. “Why can’t we humans understand that nature is all we have?” May was thinking. “That nature isn’t inside the economy but obviously, everything is inside nature?” When Kai walked into the kitchen, she had just begun to cry, leaning over the kitchen counter on her elbows. He placed his hands gently on her shoulders “Tell me, what’s the matter, love?” She burst into unrestrained sobs, a fountain of rage and disillusionment.
“I wish all these obese, oil-drooling goons would just shrivel into mummies!” With her chin on his shoulder she hissed, “We don’t need their ignorant, droopy-faced arrogance.”
“Let it all out,” he said, secretly on the verge of ears of outrage himself.
From the novel, Tickling the Bear, by David Wann
