I DUNNO–will credit if I find out:

Perhaps we might still be able to mitigate the worst effects of climate change, but maintaining our current life into the next century and beyond is optimistic to the point of hallucination. To accept this outcome is difficult because it entails accepting that the future is no longer a space of infinite possibility–rather a house mortgaged to the hilt , a foreclosure waiting. We must create new ways to think about what comes next, but also about what came before. As coastland drowns, as wildfires thin the ground and thicken the air, as changes that used to take centuries begin to take years, it will become increasingly difficult to anchor our memories to a geography, to a stable piece of land. So we must find other anchors–anchors that link memory to people, to relationships, to the solidarity and compassion and resistance that will serve as our only useful lifeboats in this storm.  We have an obligation to document and preserve our stories, ourselves, and we have an obligation to do it now, meticulously, because the stories and the empathy they engender might save us still, might move people to act. And because in time the world in which those stories took place may well vanish, in its place a different, emptier world in which these stories took place may well vanish, in its place a different, emptier world –emptier of nature, emptier of life; the stories, once lost, lost forever….

  ______                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              MY earliest remembered story begins shortly before the age of two, with an early visit to the farm, and the mother bringing out her puppies to show and then my memory extends over time to the sound of coal settling in the grate in the dark, as I fell asleep…the sweetness of fresh picked figs, their pinked flesh awash in milkwhite ambrosia….I can’t describe the special, unique quieting and reassuring smell that gentled over the land after a heavy rain….The closeness of the attic along with the distant droning of an airplane while snuggling up on the cot in the attic, after climbing the steep stairs sleepily….my doll with the hole in her head to accommodate a hair ribbon….what seemed like hours watching the ant parade as it raced all in a line across the red clay beside the back steps, the ants greeting each other as they marched, and the time they left a gift for me: an old belt buckle….The shiny green leaves of a bush out front, which let you make faces on it with your fingernails, and even the wonder of the taste and weight of the scuppernongs hanging from the grape arbor….And the taste of my grandmother’s homemade peach ice cream after the harvest….and the softness of her lap in the rockingchair, the comforting sound of its squeaking, and the dimples in her elbows….