Take lots of pictures. Photograph nature as much as you can. Take pictures of trees and flower and shrubs, and all the commonplace plants you see every day in your neighborhood. Shoot butterflies, bees, and birds, rabbits and chipmunks and squirrels, whatever it is that hops, crawls, buzzes, wings, strolls, and races through your yards and gardens. Snap images of the natives and the invasives, the weeds, and the intentionally planted.
It’s your record of what the world looks like midway through 2022. Take note of the differences. What has disappeared? What is thriving? Are there suddenly more of one thing and dramatically fewer of another? What about the smells?
Photograph the garbage you see, strewn by the roadways, littered everywhere, so everyday you don’t even notice it. Photograph the decay, the new, the old, the forgotten. It’s your documentary so that you can show your children the world as it was.
Things change, sometimes so slowly you’d barely notice. Sometimes in the blink of an eye. The human population, for instance, is more than double than the year I was born. The wildlife population less than half. I’ve noticed it on my windshield. Summers of my youth, my windshield was splattered with insects so thick I had to stop and clean it off.
My high school did a ride from the Philadelphia suburbs to the Jersey shore and I rode in it my junior year. The principal of the high school led the way as dozens of us crossed the Commodore Barry Bridge on a May morning as the sun rose on the New Jersey horizon. We wore regular clothes. I wore cut-off Levi’s and a t-shirt, a sweatshirt rolled up around my waste. My ride: a too-small Scwhinn Varsity that I’d been given for my twelfth birthday.
There was a long, car-less stretch of road surrounded on both sides by trees and open fields. For miles, snails by the thousands were determined to get from one side to the other and we had to swerve and dodge to avoid them. There were so many snails, some inadvertent snail squishings couldn’t be helped and they crunched beneath our tires and some combination of snail goo and shell stuck to them for miles after. That stretch of road has filled up with housing developments and places to buy things. The road was widened to accommodate the increased traffic. You can imagine the fate of the snail population.
The point is, things that are now gone were once common. My kids don’t believe me about the windshield insect apocalypses because they’ve never seen one for themselves. My grandparents were alive to see carrier pigeons blackening the sky and lived in cities where the streets were filled with pedestrians, bicycles, and horse traffic, only occasionally interrupted by the belch of an automobile. Of course, it wasn’t all rose petals and rainbows. Soot from coal burning coated the buildings and blackened the air and children worked long days in factories.
Take note of these things. Take pictures.
Philadelphia Pants 