Planting, the see'ds of science

Three years ago to the day, on April 13, 2021, the backyard forsythia was in bloom. There are even more flowers on it today than there were three years ago but we don’t have pictures yet this year. Here’s evidence of microclimate, because the forsythia in front of the house hasn’t yet begun to flower. It spends less time in the sun than the backyard bush does.

a forsythia’s early blooms

Photo by J. Harrington

Several days ago I found myself pondering whether the oxygen content of the atmosphere varied by season, since during winter in the Northern Hemisphere, deciduous trees don’t have active leaves engaged in photosynthesis, inhaling carbon dioxide and exhaling oxygen. Turns out the content does vary by season and someone even made an animation of it. I’m almost ready to start accepting the poetry of science, although that wouldn’t exist if science didn’t study nature.

Singularity

Marie Howe

^{(after Stephen Hawking)}

Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity
we once were?

so compact nobody
needed a bed, or food or money—

nobody hiding in the school bathroom
or home alone

pulling open the drawer
where the pills are kept.

For every atom belonging to me as good
Belongs to you.   Remember?
There was no   Nature.    No
 them.   No tests
to determine if the elephant
grieves her calf    or if

the coral reef feels pain.    Trashed
oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French;

would that we could wake up   to what we were
—when we were ocean    and before that
to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was
liquid and stars were space and space was not

at all—nothing

before we came to believe humans were so important
before this awful loneliness.

Can molecules recall it?
what once was?    before anything happened?

No I, no We, no one. No was
No verb      no noun
only a tiny tiny dot brimming with

is is is is is

All   everything   home

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