Orion Winter 2023

A SA CHILD, I was engrossed by Peanuts, a study of unrequited affections in which we never see the girl Charlie Brown longs for except her silhouette in the distance, necessarily out of reach. “Each of us can imagine what she must look like much better than I could ever draw her,” Charles Schulz said, when asked why the little red-haired girl doesn’t appear in the original strips. Having come of age in the rhythmic suburban stretches of northern Illinois, where the gridded streets were as angular as a newspaper comic, I understood. I had learned by then that love could never survive the distance to the one you love. Years before we married, when my wife and I lived in different parts of the U.S., we developed ways to…

WHERE DOES your mind go when you hear the term climate change? Do you think about love? I didn’t used to. My mind would go straight to how we mitigate, adapt, and protect those most vulnerable. To carbon standards, clean energy incentives, and environmental justice. What does love have to do with it? Quite a bit, I’ve begun to realize. In fact, I’ve started to see love everywhere now in our ever-expanding relationship with climate change. I see love smoldering under the climate anxiety and grief so many people feel for our beleaguered world. For the acidifying oceans, burning forests, and desperate orcas. And for the intricate construct of civilization itself, painstakingly assembled over four hundred generations, and now facing ruin. I infer love when I listen to young people…

Spring Has Left Us ON A THURSDAY MORNING in April, I walk into the Sunder Nursery Gardens in Delhi’s city center. These outings are a customary habit, instilled by my father when we were growing up. Our neighborhood was far from Delhi’s gardens and green spaces, tightly meshed into concrete. It lacked the bounty of hopping birds, mulberry-laden trees, and massive canopies of banyan trees. In springtime, we traveled to the city center for picnics with our cousins and friends. While my parents lay beneath trees, my sister and I watched parrots and roamed, wearing frangipani flowers in our hair. Today it is too hot for me to linger on these memories. I walk past the old fifteenth-century monuments engraved with Persian script, along the geometric canal where birds dunk…

THE SWORD FERNS were brown—covered with a layer of dust from the forest floor. I reached down and rubbed a slender frond, revealing the green beneath. The dust coated my sneakers and the dog’s paws. It was unsettling, this rainforest without rain. Every afternoon, when I was granted a few hours’ leave from the hospital, the dog and I walked those trails. Or, I should say, the dog and I and the two proto-people growing inside my body. I never knew how to count us: were we two or four? The doctors had moved me into the antenatal wing of the women’s hospital in an attempt to prevent what had already gone wrong in my pregnancy from going worse. By twenty-eight weeks, we had survived a pandemic, a major surgery,…

You cross in front of me speakingto the sun. Then you turn away south,saying rain snow. Miles until we see north,blue and less blue, changingwhere silver evolves: mountain, clouds. I slip in the silt and land on my handswhere a glacier had been, no morethan a valley in Denali now. Two ptarmigans bobsled the tundra,stopping to nod at the wind.You keep moving, the same song playing in the grass, in your long strides.You point out animal tracks.I push myself away from the place that has you distant and educating the skywith your walking stick.Now it’s raining. I need time, I say, standing up to your silence,ready to fail another somebody.You get farther ahead. Above us, the mountains are a bowland glacier waters blue the spilling eye.The rain stops. The story…

UNTIL I VISITED California Carnivores, the largest carnivorous plant nursery in the United States, I didn’t know there was a world of these plants beyond the Venus flytrap. I’d grown up seeing flytraps—with a warning not to touch—in museum gift shops or nurseries. When the plants sense a meal on their serrated mouths, they close their jaws and form a stomach. Their leaves secrete enzymes, and they digest their prey. When the leaves open, only a husk of chitin—the insect exoskeleton—is left. The plants shouldn’t spend their energy closing around nothing. That’s why you’re not supposed to wantonly touch them. The greenhouse is a humid, tropical riot of reds, oranges, yellows, greens. I’ve stepped into another world. It smells sweet and wet, musty like a bedroom after sex. The plants…