Climate Change

My house looks out on bay marshland so we see the tide go in, go out, the bike path disappear during a full moon. It's nice, this unspoken tie to it all, something that I forget sometimes, take for granted most times. Although one of my favorite small pleasures happens when I get off the bus at the end of the day from my commute back from the city--I take a deep breath of salt air. It smells of sweet grass and right.

Which is why it suddenly struck me how wrong it is that every photo I have taken this winter is of us sailing or swimming or at the beach, short sleeves and warm. We are smiling, I won't lie. 72 degrees in January is amazing, but it is an unsettled amazing. Amazement met with worry, with a gut level realization that this is wrong, because really? This is the driest year in recorded history and everywhere I go conversations are peppered with percentages of rainfall, record high temperatures and the rapid increase of catastrophic fire. My skin is dry, my eyes feel gritty, my banana plant died from frost or lack of water, not sure, the hills are the silver gray of teak. I am scared, and I want to turn to Zoey and Ozzy and apologize profusely because this is my fault--our fault--not theirs. We fucked up, and now they have to live with it.

So here we are. It's been a beautiful winter, stunning. Today we went on a bike ride and I wore a tank top. I am trying, but it's hard to see the glass half full when the Sierra snow pack is grasping at 17%.