I wrote most of these words at home, settled at my kitchen table or on my porch or at my desk in the back room. I wrote them through a pandemic that confined me, like many people, to a smaller-scale life. For months, I barely left my neighborhood, tracing the same sidewalks, the same footpaths, day after day.
But paradoxically, as my life felt more constrained, the boundary between the global and the personal seemed even more porous than before. The world was inexorably connected by a virus. The world was quarrelsome and factional and unstable but sometimes shaken by shared angers or anxieties. The fiery racial justice protests that broke out in Minneapolis also reverberated into my city, my neighborhood. My neighbors marched down my street with their small children and chanted “Black Lives Matter” in front of a cluster of aging bungalows, at the edge of an industrial river, in view of a shipping port that sends cargo between my city and other continents. The emergencies that appeared on national news were personal. Friends fled from hurricanes and wildfires, driving hours along highways that became corridors of flame or spending entire days stranded in a line of cars leading away from the coast. A tropical storm poured sheets of water onto the houses of my relatives.
All of these disruptions blurred in my mind, especially at night. I dreamed about escaping floods. I dreamed about running from fires. I dreamed that I was walking through a dry valley while big-eyed animals stared at me. I dreamed about a fleet of fuming diesel trucks charging toward me through a narrow tunnel.
On one cluster of days in late June 2021, my city and my region of mountains and water groaned with extraordinary heat. In many places, the heat surpassed anything written down in more than a century of weather records: 108 degrees Fahrenheit in Seattle, 116 in Portland, 118 near Forks, sandwiched between the coast and the rain forest on the mossy Olympic Peninsula. The days were thirty to forty degrees above normal, as if someone had invented an entirely new season for the region. News reports described the temperatures with words like shattered and broken.
What I sensed, though, was not a shattering of reality but its suspension. Like a science fiction plot in which you are transported into an alternate world—one that looks like your own but something is off-kilter or amiss. Our house had no air-conditioning apart from a few ragged-looking ornamental plum trees that kept some of the sunlight off the roof. During the peak heat of the hottest day, my body felt leaden. I was unable to form full thoughts. My cat sprawled across the floor with an elongated spine and cast pitiful looks in my direction. I occupied myself with the constant readjustment of the three electric fans we owned, trying to channel air through the house efficiently enough to keep myself from withering. Finally, that afternoon, my husband and I drove to a reliably cold urban lake and jumped in. This wasn’t merely recreation but a survival strategy. The human body can withstand some amount of scorching heat if it has time to cool, especially at night. But in this moment, water offered more relief than nighttime. At dusk, the sky hazed over with a blistering mustard-colored sunset, and the air remained in the 90s Fahrenheit until well after dark.
Just north of Seattle, transportation crews shut down multiple lanes of the interstate after they warped and buckled in the heat. At the shores of the estuary that curves between Seattle and Canada, mussels, oysters, clams, and snails clung to the rocks and died in the sun. Kelp and surfgrass bleached to white. In the days thereafter, the beaches smelled like rot. The estimated human death toll was more than 1,200 in Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia combined. We were all at risk, all inescapably bound to one another, mussel to rock to beach, human to city to water, ocean to atmosphere.
By now, I hope you are reading this book from a place of safety, but I know that may not be the case. The world feels perilous. There is uncertainty in the air, at our feet, in the water, in the wind pressing against the windows.
I have told you that we will need to learn how to live in an era of storms and disruption.
I have tried to offer you stories that are like fables. Platitudes are cheap, but fables offer lessons drawn from experience and metaphor. What I found in these stories were lessons about home.
Home is powerful because it is both an intimate place and also a place of connection. To have safe homes in the twenty-first century, we cannot keep acting as if we are isolated individuals. We are not just consumers. We are not just a collection of independent bodies with separate carbon footprints. There are no sharp boundaries between our lives and the lives of others. There are no clear borders between the safety of our households and our bodies and the health of the land and the ecosystems around us.
We are building and rebuilding the world every day, even when we are not acting deliberately. We are all reworking the next acts of these stories right now, collectively.
And while many of the problems we face are global, some of the most imaginative, powerful, passionate solutions come from home. Home is a place we can act. Home is a place we can take care of. Home is a feeling that can inspire us. Home is a way for us to rethink and reimagine and remake our lives. Home asks us to adjust ourselves, to rewrite ourselves, to reconsider who we are, again and again, each time we occupy a new space or refashion an old one. We are all building these walls and roofs and lives together, on this one messy and unruly blue planet.