Chapter 5 — Noticing
A serial novel in the form of correspondence among a family while the world as we know it collapses around us. I recommend you start at the Introduction:
https://readmedium.com/climate-for-change-introduction-5331d5ab9313
But you can start anywhere you want.
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Chapter 5:
Email:
Dear Grandpa,
This week we didn’t have enough players to play our soccer game. We had to forfeit. Three of our Latinx players didn’t show up and didn’t answer texts, and two other players were out sick. Maybe it is like your dairy farm friends, and they just left because of all the racism. I don’t know. Nobody knows. Jeremy and I rode our bikes over to Marco’s house. He hasn’t been answering my texts. At his house, nobody was home. Their car was in the driveway, and there were toys on the lawn. It was just quiet. Weird.
Mom sent money to an online campaign for the firefighters in Montana. She said that ever since the PFL cut the Federal budget for non-military branches, the bulk of the firefighters have been volunteers and prison labor. I didn’t know that! I told Mom she could send some of my money, too. I don’t have a credit card, but I gave her some cash that I had earned mowing our neighbor’s lawn, and she put an extra $20 in the online fund. They are not even asking for money for the firefighters. They are asking for money for the fuel and fire retardant for the airplanes. That makes me so mad! If we have money for the army, why can’t we pay our firefighters? Or why don’t we send the soldiers out to fight the fires?
You can tell Grandma that my latest project is just to “notice things.” Ever since Mom suggested that we all need to pay attention, I have been seeing things everywhere. The leaflets on the poles about immigrants were just the beginning. I have been noticing police cars in our neighborhood. I am seeing that one out of every five cars is actually an ICE car, Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They say “pol-ICE” on the side of the car, and they look just like the regular police, but they are not. I had never seen one before I started looking for them, and now I see them everywhere.
Last night Jeremy and I were riding our bikes home from soccer practice, and we saw one of the ICE cars driving slowly down a street with a huge spotlight that was pointing down alleys and between houses as they drove. Jeremy and I turned our bikes to follow them. At one point the ICE car stopped, and two officers jumped out with their guns drawn and started running down an alley. Jeremy and I kept on riding. We were both curious to see who they were chasing, but we were more scared than curious. When I got home, I could barely stop myself from shaking, and my heart was racing. Mom told me to take deep breaths and drink some water, which, you know, is her solution to everything. I didn’t realize how terrified I was. I can hardly imagine how scary it might be to be chased by ICE agents, so I shouldn’t complain about being scared to see it happen to someone else, but it was scary!
I have also been noticing how people carry themselves when they walk down the sidewalk. Some people walk like they are proud of themselves. Some slump their shoulders and look at the ground. I wonder what people think of me when they watch me walk? I would like to confidently walk down the sidewalk and meet people’s gaze. But if I am honest, I am usually in my own little world when I am out walking somewhere.
I looked at the weather website today, and you were right about the tropical storm in the Gulf. Have you seen the storm that is brewing in the eastern Caribbean? They say it is even bigger. Yikes! It looks like the Southeast might finally get that rain they have been praying for. Maybe too much!
Give Grandma our love and tell her that we love the blackberry jam.
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Benji,
Grandma was pleased that you like the jam. There is more where that came from! Our pantry is stocked and overflowing. We keep canning tomatoes, making pickles, and making sauerkraut. We figure that way we can share it with you and our friends over the course of the year. It is good to have enough that we can be generous. We are also big into the apple harvest now. The solar dehydrator is on constant rotation making apple chips, and we are making applesauce and apple butter every day. We have been canning some apple juice, but I have saved most of the juice back in carboys to make apple cider vinegar and hard cider. It is an okay year for apples. If it would have rained AT ALL in August and September, it would have been much better. Luckily, we mulched the trees last fall with wood chips and that preserved some of the soil moisture. Remember that day? I have never seen someone so excited to drive a tractor! You did great with the front-end loader moving that massive pile of wood chips. I was proud and also glad I didn’t have to do it.
You should see if your Mom can bring you and your sister out here next weekend to help with the apple harvest. We could use experienced workers like you two.
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Grandpa,
Thanks for the invite for apple harvesting. Do you think I could bring some friends? There are some people I met at soccer practice this week who I’d like to invite out to pick apples. I think they would enjoy it. There is a girl named Daisy and her younger brother is Jorge. They had come by the soccer field looking for their cousin Antonio, who is on our team. He is one of the three Latinx boys who didn’t show up for the game last week. After practice, Daisy, Jorge, Jeremy, and I rode our bikes over to Antonio’s house, and it was the same as Marco’s house. Car in the driveway, toys in the yard, but no sign of people. This time we knocked on the door of the next-door neighbor. At first they said they didn’t know anything. They said they keep to themselves and don’t notice anything about their neighbors. We said that we would like to know anything at all, and we gave them my phone number and then left on our bikes. Five minutes later, I got a call. It was from a girl who lives in Antonio’s neighbors’ house. She had heard our conversation with her parents and then convinced them to give her my number.
The girl said that it was after midnight a few days ago, when three black SUVs pulled up in front. She remembers because officers had come to the side door, right by her bedroom window. They were all wearing black and had helmets on and guns drawn and were just standing outside the door. There were officers at the back door and the front door, too. She said that all at once, they broke down all three doors. Within minutes the whole family had been shuttled to the black SUVs, and they were gone. The next morning at 7 a.m., a work crew came to fix the doors on the house, and they were gone by 7:30, and it was just as if nothing had happened. She is friends with Antonio’s younger sister, she said, and she wondered if we might help her find them.
After I got off the phone with the girl, Daisy, Jorge, Jeremy, and I just rode our bikes around for a long time. We finally stopped in a park and climbed into the play structure. Daisy was shaking. I don’t think it was helpful when I pointed out that Antonio’s parents are actually legal residents. Daisy said that her own parents were born in the U.S., but her grandparents were born in Honduras and were legal residents, too, but did not have full citizenship. She was worried about her grandparents and said so. This got both her and Jorge crying. Jeremy and I listened to them for a long time. They told us what it is like for them and their family. There are a lot of little racist acts that we white people don’t ever see. Daisy introduced Jeremy and me to the term “micro-aggression,” and then described one instance after another. After telling their stories, they both stopped shaking, and we rode with them back to their house.
Do you see Grandpa? When I started noticing, I had no idea there was so much to notice! Daisy said she and Jorge would come by practice tomorrow so we could go and see what happened to the other two boys. I’d like to invite her whole family out to harvest apples.
Yikes! I just saw a video about a forest fire in Oregon. People were driving down a road with walls of flame on either side! And did you see that there is a third tropical storm that has formed in the Atlantic Ocean? I told Mom that we should turn off the air conditioner to try to slow down climate change. She said that she would consider not having the house so cold, but she needed some AC because of all the pollen in the air. We compromised and now have the AC set to keep the house at 78 instead of 68. Melody is furious with me. She says she can’t invite her friends over because they will complain about how hot the house is. I told her to think about how hot the people are in California next to the wildfires. She didn’t like it, but she did agree with me. She wants to do good in the world just like me. Currently she and I are sweating on the porch outside, both on our devices, waiting for the sun to go down so it will cool off a little. The chickens in the yard are holding their wings out away from their bodies and sort of panting with open mouths, trying to beat the heat in their own way.
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Dear Benjamin,
Of course, your friends can come and bring their family. We always have plenty of food, and we would love the company. They could plan to stay the night, and we can all have my famous hash browns and scrambled eggs for breakfast. What time do you think you all might make it out here on Saturday?
In other news, I have figured out a way to get more news about climate change. I went down to the basement and found my dad’s old ham radio. I made an antenna out of wire coat hangers and duct taped it to the bathroom vent on the roof. Your grandmother was not happy with me for risking my life up there, but it all paid off. The radio can pick up a signal from an international English Broadcast Group station. It has news all the time, and I cannot believe what they are saying. They talk about climate change every hour. It seems that there are major hurricanes brewing in every northern subtropical ocean: off the coast of China, in Indonesia, and in the Indian Ocean. There are wildfires in Europe, Siberia, Northwest China, Nepal, Sub-Saharan Africa, and all over Mexico. The reporter spoke about how there is a massive ice shelf in Greenland that has a crack that covers 90% of its coastline. They are predicting it could be a matter of days before it becomes the largest iceberg in recorded history.
The English Broadcast Group news talked about how the President-For-Life has not been seen for days. He has been locked in his bedchambers with requests to only send cheeseburgers through the slot in the door. The White House staff can hear Government News blaring at full volume. He keeps messaging about how immigrants have been setting the fires all over the west in order to hurt him. Yesterday there was a message that said “If the climate were changing, which it isn’t, it would be better for the U.S.A. anyway because warmer weather will help America’s farmers.” And later there was a message: “It is the no-talent Hollywood Jews who are behind the claims that climate change is harmful. If you don’t like the heat, turn up the AC!”
We haven’t heard anything about him being locked in his room on our news. In fact, yesterday I saw photos of him out at some school — reading to the children from one of his children’s books about his life. There was also a story about how he said he was going to Florida to go golfing and that reports of an impending tropical storm were lies by the other party. I don’t know who to believe, but I have a sneaking suspicion our PFL is not telling the truth. And I am also deeply unsettled by the anti-Semitism in his remarks. When things get bad, people have historically blamed the Jews as a scapegoat. There is a lot of Jew-blaming going around and that must mean things are getting pretty bad.
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Dear Grandpa,
WOW!
I told Mom and some kids on my soccer team all that you said the English Broadcast Group had reported. Nobody believed me. My mom said she knew about the tropical storms, but didn’t think they were that bad because no one on the weather website is calling them hurricanes. She also knew about the fires but then said something like “California is always on fire.” One member of my team said that any news we might have heard about the fires being bad was just propaganda from the Hollywood Jews to make the PFL look bad. Yikes! I wonder if he would have made that remark if the PFL hadn’t already been making anti-Jew remarks. Then somebody else said that maybe it would be okay if some of California burned, and some people laughed, like it was a joke. Basically, they said that if it were that bad, we would have been told about it already. Even Mom said something like that! She said that you always exaggerate. I wish that were the case, but I am worried.
I’m looking forward to seeing you this weekend! Daisy said she would ask her parents about coming.
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Next chapter:
https://readmedium.com/chapter-6-noticing-the-good-dc64b167cbfc
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