Hope

“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” Emily Dickinson wrote in 1861, wisely putting quotation marks around the word to signify its unreliability, for nothing is more easily crushed in our world today. Here in New Mexico, hope, for me, is the thing that blossoms in the fruit trees now in full bloom all over town, seeming immune to drought and fire, which of course they are not. But, being trees, they are immune to discouragement and despair, a threat for all of us as we head into a broiling summer (there never used to be any need for air-conditioners here and now the summer is intolerable without them), and for us living in Santa Fe, the looming decision on the part of the Forest Service to set the Santa Fe National Forest ablaze soon in yet another “controlled” burn.

But I’ll pass over all this anxiety at least for today and dwell on what I see and experience as long-term reasons for hope:

The generation of my grandchildren, people now in their twenties, often don’t want to own cars. It used to be the crowning achievement for sixteen-year-olds, who rushed to take driving tests and to try to finance some kind of a vehicle, leading, of course, to the pile-up of planet destroying toxins we see today. It may be too late to reverse or even modify global warming, but at least the young people appear to be listening.

A subjective note on the way young men in this generation seem to have absorbed at least some of the wisdom of their perhaps-feminist mothers: a gentleness, a quietness we didn’t always associate with masculinity and surely the happy result of the loosening of gender definitions. Early marriage and broods of children seem to have diminished, too, and the option of not having children has gained new legitimacy. The daughter of a friend is upset that her close friend has become pregnant with no possibility of a job or daycare of a partner; not too long ago, any pregnancy, no matter how ill-timed, would have been greeted with an outpouring of sentiment, baby showers and so forth.

And we continue, at least most of us, to recycle. I’ve recently enrolled in a program here called Broken Arrow; once a week, they pick up all my glass (no longer recycled locally) and turn it into pretty glasses of all shapes and colors. My kitchen scraps now go into a special green bucket, also picked up once a week and put into a community composting program, far more practical than doing it at home.

Small, dedicated not-for-profits here continue to challenge the grotesque increase of nuclear pits, triggers for warheads, at the accident-prone Los Alamos Labs just up the hill, while other small groups vigorously protest the Forest Service plans to envelop us one day soon in toxic smoke and the possibility of another out-of-control “controlled” burn, this time within a few miles of town.

The five hundred families in Mora, Taos and Las Vegas counties who lost everything in the 3020-acre “controlled” burn a year ago, in the same arid and windy spring weather, were small people, not likely to wield a lot of political power, but the owners of multi-billion dollar houses here will not be so easily ignored if they are burned out.

So, some hope for hope, especially in the presence of flowering trees.

In New Mexico Wildfires Los Alamos