Few and far between are the writers that can kick off an authentic hyperfixation, alas, but Adam Higginbotham has done it to me twice now. His Midnight in Chernobyl is up there with Svetlana Alexeivich in the definitive bibliography of that clusterfuck. Now he takes on the other great engineering catastrophe of the first half of 1986. His is an oddly specific niche.

I am so profoundly torn about the shuttle program. It represented the democratization of space. Its astronaut class, the thirty-five new guys, was the first to include women and people of color. Dad and my brothers and I got up before dawn to watch Columbia’s first launch. When I took the kids to see Endeavour in Los Angeles, I cried. This awkward camel of a spacecraft made the universe bigger: no shuttle, no Hubble Ultra Deep Field. I’m such a fucking fangirl, I have NASA plates on my car.

But NASA straight up murdered the Challenger 7. The agency’s budget peaked during the Apollo program, and the diversity of astronaut class eight was an attempt to build public support for space exploration. It kind of worked! Everybody loved Sally Ride, the hot bi butch with the name right out of Mustang Sally! That line of reasoning led to putting a social studies teacher on top of a missile and, in the presence of her parents who were on camera as these events took place, blowing her up.

NASA’s position was: look at all we can do, with how little money! Everyone can play, even the girls and the brown people! Just keep letting us fly rockets. Politicians were all, I wish to associate myself with these impressive feats! But no, you can’t have any more money. Meanwhile engineers at Morton-Thiokol knew the O-rings would fail at low temperatures. There was an impassioned conference call about it the night before the launch. NASA had so many chances not to kill these seven incredible and accomplished people, and it missed them all.

And then seventeen years later, it did it again.

I think this particular book hit so hard in this election year because we are all of us helpless passengers on a spaceship out of control. Anyway, my hyperfixation – after this book I borrowed everything the SFPL had on the space programs. My standouts: Michael Collins is the best writer of the Apollo astronauts – as somebody somewhere said, his Carrying the Fire reads like EB White got a trip to the moon. First Man is an extraordinary, very literary biography of Armstrong, adapted into maybe my favorite space movie since The Martian. (Armstrong was a near-contemporary of the New Zealand writer Janet Frame, whose An Angel at my Table made a striking compare-and-contrast to First Man. Tl; dr much better to be a weird clever man in the 20th century than a weird clever woman.)

Bringing Columbia Home is the kind of awkwardly written but almost unbearably moving account of the recovery of those astronauts. Leaving Orbit, about the last flights of the shuttle, has a similarly elegiac mood. Finally, the podcast The Space Above Us, which deals with crewed space missions one at a time, kept me and Jeremy enthralled on an entire 12-hour road trip home from Portland. A gem of the genre.

(I usually end up short-changing good books toward the end of my list so this year I’m going to split things up into separate reviews instead.) Ed Yong’s An Immense World turned up on everyone’s lists of favorites the year it came out, and deservedly so. Late to the party, I listened to the audiobook which Ed Yong himself read brilliantly. Not to be a shallow bitch but the narrator of an audiobook makes a huge difference. A bad narrator leaves you struggling to parse whatever sense the author was trying to make, whereas the author reading his own work competently draws you by gentle degrees all the way into his own sphere of perception.

Check out that segue! Because this book is about animals’ spheres of perception – their umwelt – and how their various sensory capabilities, so different from ours, mean that they live in overlapping but fundamentally nonidentical universes from us and from one another. This is, in fact, a book about empathy. However well the narrator reads, we can’t experience life from the point of view of another being, but in spite of the impossibility of doing so, it’s incredibly important to try.

I did think about my political opponents, listening to this book before the election. I tried to imagine the world from their point of view, and how their choices – ruinous from where I’m standing – might make sense to them. It was hard and probably futile but it was one small thing that helped me to clamber out of the impact crater in the awful days immediately after.

In January 2014, the four of us were flying home from a Christmas trip to Australia. We transited in Auckland and I called my mother, who had seen her oncologist while we were in the air. “He said that it is in my stomach, in a knot. He said that this is the end.” Whenever I fly through Auckland now I can feel it, my knees buckling, my 8yo and 11yo trying to hold me up. We flew on to San Francisco where I held my beloved and very elderly cat Bebe while I booked my own flight back to Australia. I left Jeremy to take care of those scared little kids, and I never saw Bebe again.

When I got to Barraba Mum had been set up in the palliative care room at the local hospital, which had its own lounge with foldout sofas. My brothers and her friends would come and go. We played mah jongg for hours. I curled up with Mum on the sofa and we watched the Last of the Summer Wine on my laptop. Her friends had made her a beautiful patchwork quilt and we wrapped ourselves in it. There was so much joy. The nurses said it sounded like we were having a family holiday, and we were. We told a lot of jokes. One morning I asked her what she wanted for breakfast: “Gin and tonic.” “Coming right up!”

I sometimes say that Mum went nova. In four weeks she poured out twenty years of unconditional love. When Bebe died, Mum held me and said, “It’s okay to cry.” I said “Mum, if I start crying, I’ll never stop.” She said, “Yes you will.” I think about that all the time.

When she died, the nurses let me help wash her body, and I cried, and I kissed her cooling flesh. It was the honor of my life to attend at my mother’s death. I think of the radiance of her love, and I think of my clarity in the moment. Let me carry that grace in my heart and hands all the days of my life.

I tested positive for Covid on Sunday, my first time. The last of my family to get it, nearly five years into this global panny-D in which we find ourselves, I thought I was doing the tests wrong.

I’d been run-down since Thursday. Cortland Street was closed to traffic for the first time but I missed Halloween. On Saturday afternoon I could only ride my bike as far as Potrero del Sol, to look at the Day of the Dead altars and the squares of the AIDS quilt in the crisp autumn sun. Marigolds and grief. I cried for the lost boys who should have been my queer elders.

By Saturday night my temperature was 100.6 and it took some effort to breathe. When I finally called my doctors on Sunday, wheezing, they sent me to the emergency room. In the friendly robot taxi I wept for the people who went to the ER with Covid in 2020, and who said goodbye to their families through iPads, and who died. Me, I had x-rays which ruled out pneumonia, was given paxlovid and all the steroids and came home to quarantine in the attic.

Election day is a more reliable trauma trigger even than the week in which both my parents died. I spent the morning text banking in Michigan, then I howled all through therapy, deep, racking sobs for all that we have lost. Afterwards the cats insisted on taking me out into the garden, where the linnets and phoebes and hummingbirds and crows had various constructive things to say.

I took portraits of the sticky monkeyflower and hummingbird sage and Douglas iris. I chatted to my sister in outback NSW. I scrubbed out the bird-feeder with hot water and soap. That’s about all I had in me, and now I’m back in my college kid’s bed, looking over Excelsior and San Bruno Mountain as the sun sets into the Pacific. May all beings know peace.

Just after I got home from Tokyo the seasonal switch got flipped. (Oh, yeah, I had a work trip to Japan. I had a wood-paneled hotel room like a cabin with tiny lounge chairs around a tiny table and a delicious bakery downstairs, and I did my work things and then walked for miles and miles through the city like a character from a William Gibson novel or Hayao Miyazaki film. I was very lonely but it was excellent. Maybe that version of me is real and she is imagining my family and my garden and my menagerie in California. Anyway.) I rode Lenny in the late summer heat wave and stopped at Canyon Market on the way home, after dark. People were buying firewood and persimmons had come into season and there was a chill in the air. Fall.

We moved here in April of 98, an unusually wet spring, and it wasn’t until I drove back from the playa that September, crossing the Bay Bridge at 3am, filthy, exhausted and happy, that I saw the lights of San Francisco and my heart said: “home.” Another year I remember unlocking the door to our house on Alabama Street and feeling the twilight chill and thinking of apple pie. The city is at its most beautiful in October, when the drawn-out summer wrestles with the brilliant dark, and loses.

Election years are especially wrenching in this respect, when the encroaching cold threatens to swallow up all the bitterly-fought-for, hard-won concessions to our collective humanity. It sucks to have to beg for our lives every four years. I have to drag myself out of the doomscroll with an act of will. It helps to think about deep time. Turtle Island, I say to myself, and the bay fills in with prairie that stretches out to the Farallones, where smilodon and direwolves hunt camels and rhinos and woolly mammoths. It also helps to be completely in the moment. I turn on the Merlin app and try to see the cedar waxwings singing in the lillipilli tree. I think about Ed Yong’s powerful xoxo talk, and how he counter-balanced his pandemic grief by paying attention to lazuli buntings and the tide.

It was high tide at Heron’s Head this weekend, the path stretching out into the bay like a road to the land of the dead. I walked along the path furious. Why does it feel like I was put on this earth to love things, only to have them ripped from my hands? Why do I get a ringside seat to the sixth extinction, and why do I have to feel it so deeply? A sardonic voice in my head, maybe my mother’s, said, “Because you’re good at it.” I thought of that edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall with the Roman column crumbling to ruins. (1946, oof.) I thought (again) of the lyric from The Mountain Goats song Fresh Tattoo: “all of this will disappear in the twinkling of an eye.” I’m sentient stardust witnessing the heat death of the universe, and I’m grateful, so grateful, for every bit of beauty and grace.

Me, in possession of new riding gloves: We can prance if we want to, we can leave your friends behind, cause your friends don’t prance and if they don’t prance well they’re no friends of mine. It’s safe to prance

Jeremy, very seriously: It is NOT safe to prance. Not without hats!

It’s a dream still, the dream of being allowed full participation. The dream is alive, I suppose. The dream is still in the process of coming true.

Last night the Saturn V looked very graceful, suspended by a cross fire of searchlights which made it sparkle like a delicate opal and silver necklace against the black sky. Today it is a machine again

He could watch long, solitary waves rise up in the middle of a relative nowhere, deep in the South Atlantic or far off the Alaskan coast, giant walls of water that were built up until they broke over themselves, having come and gone, gorgeous, and having been invisible to everybody but him.

We might discover life in other solar systems someday, but for now there’s nothing but chaos and blackness and desolation for billions of light-years in every direction. Yet here in the middle of all that is this magnificent place, this brilliant blue planet, teeming with life. It really is a paradise.

I can remember with perfect clarity the night we found Jupiter.

“The problem with Challenger wasn’t the machine. The machine was trying to talk to us, but we didn’t listen.”

It’s hard to explain to people who haven’t lived here how much we start to miss nature. In the future there will be a word for the specific kind of nostalgia we feel for living things.

Human intelligence is not a gift. It’s an occasionally useful plague.

We wouldn’t exist without the obliterating smack of cosmic rock that plowed itself into the ancient Yucatán. Both stories are present in that moment. The rise and the fall are inextricable.

Jeremy flew to Oslo on the solstice and we are all trying to be very brave about it. He sent a picture of a gorgeous 1am twilight. But this morning I got two more Heath Ceramics salad plates in another suburban parking lot transaction, so who is the real adventurer here, hm?

The last couple of rides on Lenny I have been struggling to level up, to lighten my contact, to make my signals imperceptible, so it was pretty nice today to be able to cue the trot invisibly, by flexing my inside hip. The hard part – one of the hard parts – about riding is getting the timing right. (Other hard parts include Paying For It and Not Falling Off.) I know the theory but theory gets you almost nowhere. Lenny is alive and sparkly and opinionated and I need to be able to react to him in near-real time, and it’s only after four years of very patient and consistent training that I can be strong and quiet enough in the saddle for him to hear me. I adore him. What a pony.

I drive back from the summery oak-savannah hills to into a curtain of grey fog. The garden is too windy to sit in most afternoons, but even here the green grass has turned pale gold. Mountain garland and wine cups and farewell-to-spring have taken over from the globe gilia and tidy tips. Their gaudy colors mean it’s almost time for Pride, and then Jeremy will be home, and then maybe Karl the Fog will ease off a little and let us have some summer evenings on the deck, with a little Hendricks and tonic.

We have the contractors back in to rip out the Mamie Eisenhower pink bathroom (I know, what barbarians, but it was leaking) and replace it with Fireclay tile and a shower under the skylight. Opening the walls revealed, as expected, eldritch horrors, most notably that the upper staircase was supported by an angled 2×6 resting on its narrowest edge.

I’m no expert but that ain’t right. While the house undergoes what’s essentially a heart transplant, the main level is a carnival maze of plastic walls with zippered doors. We’re still working from home, camping in the kitchen, on the deck and in the garden.

Luckily it’s spring and the garden is a little ridiculous, unphotographable. The box elders and grapevine are back with a vengeance, velvet green leaves casting dappled shade. The sticky monkey flower, purple and hummingbird sages are in full bloom and the meadow is a riot of poppy, tidy tips, Chinese houses, flax, globe gilia, bird’s eye gilia, the last of the five spot and baby blue eyes, Douglas iris and mountain garland. Fluffy black bees as big as your thumb buzz from poppy to poppy with panniers full of emergency-orange pollen. It’s gaudy, excessive.

Because we’re further up the hill than the Mission, closer to the edge of the fog-tide, it’s often windy back here, and I’m aware of the atmosphere as a restless, oceanic thing, always in motion. The bathroom will be tiled in celadon and silver-blue, with a terracotta sink. Earth, meadow and air. Opening the walls of my own heart reveals, as expected, eldritch horrors, but what a privilege it is to rebuild this lovely old home, make it sound and safe for the next fifty years.

I know what it feels like to fear that there might not be many meaningful strategies left.

We act like our preferences matter, because that is the job late capitalism has given us.

Hyacinth recognizes what very few people wish to admit, that civilization has a price, and a high one.