There’s a certain smell I associate with fall, a crispness that carries melancholy. These fleeting whiffs emerge in the heat of August in flashes, like heat lightning, so quick you can’t tell if it was an olfactory mirage. Sub-notes of grasses drying and going to seed. Of trees informed by the length of days, sending out the invisible signal to their leaves to withdraw the chlorophyll that will leave only color behind. In New York City, there’s the subtle ganky tang of gingko nuts crushed underfoot. But the smell recalls the same memory: I am in sixth grade, getting my new school supplies ready, covering my books with brown bags from Red Owl.
My son was born in the winter of the new millennium, when a faction of people thought the changeover to “00” would cause planes to fall out of the sky, for clocks to stop. The clocks didn’t stop, but the climate change–the threat of which fossil fuel harvesting corporations have known about since as early as 50 years ago and have done nothing but hide that information in order to pursue profits–accelerated. That bill is starting to come due. Everyone was on Twitter yesterday watching footage of a seaside house being washed away by a risen ocean. The news was careful to state not once but twice that the house was unoccupied. I.e., nothing to see here, no one was hurt. Again glossing over the fact a lot of us, the younger people disproportionately, are going to be hurt. Escaping climate change is not as easy as making sure you are not home when the sea comes for your house.
For my son, the fall doesn’t have a consistent smell. Some days we have leaves falling and budding at the same time, confused crocuses poking up out of the humus.
* * *
Fall is considered to be the Korean nation’s favorite season. This mad love for the season that twins beauty and death appeared back when I first ventured into learning my mother tongue via night classes at NYU. Our Korean 101 textbook read: “Of all the seasons, Koreans think fall is the most beautiful.”
One hears this sentiment all the time in Korea. It was new to me to think of a country, a people, having a favorite season— melancholy as part of its beauty. In the west, we seek the positive emotion, we do all we can to avoid the negative, which is probably why it’s easy to receive and absorb the comforting lies of climate change denial.
I was born in Hibbing, Minnesota, a town of around 16,000. Resource extraction is its primary industry. The town had already, however, depleted most of the iron mines while I was still a child. I would hear all the old miners complaining about China undercutting the market, while our in-class filmstrips showed that no, all the ore geologists thought was unlimited, had already been dynamited out of the ground. We were told of a time that scientists felt the huge, vast ocean could swallow up all the excess carbon we produced starting from the industrial revolution. But in this, too, humans are too good at exceeding expectations for environmental destruction.
* * *
Winter of course was the primary season for people in Hibbing. Bob Dylan, who also grew up in my town, marveled in his memoir at the length and breadth of the unrelenting cold, the unending blanket of white—to the point one would start to hallucinate. The smell of burning wood evokes atavistic relaxation at the thought of a warm orange light; other human bodies gathering, hands unfurling toward the warmth.
But I remember more a crystalline freshness, almost an absence of scent, but not quite. My spouse is always impressed when I open our NYC apartment’s window and declare it will snow. It always does. I can smell the flurries in the air before the flakes fall. It’s a certain humidity— subtler—that I can catch when it’s about to fall from battleship-gray clouds.
As with climate change, with such an unrelenting season, the western approach was to ignore or obfuscate. The “cool” thing to do was to blast the heat in your car and wear shorts all winter long. I remember in elementary school my mother making me wear clunky snow boots and being ridiculed by the other children. I took ice skating lessons, where we were made to wear short little dresses, flesh colored tights. A sweater, or even mittens, would have been laughed at. I used to hate skating practice. I’m not sure why my mother was so insistent on me and my sister taking lessons. We even had to take them in the summer, where the indoor rink would be just as miserably cold.
* * *
In the West we tend to mark the change of the seasons by somewhat egotistical measurements. There’s a feeling of indignance in the Winter Solstice, when the sun is the furthest away from us and that day is the shortest, compared to the summer when it’s the closest.
In Korea, there are beautiful poetic signposts. Dae borum is the first Full Moon after The New Year. There is another notation for “Enter spring.” Even Buddha’s birthday, Seokga tansinil, occurs on day 8 of month 4 on the lunar calendar, which means April or May. Every full moon is the 15th of the lunar month; I was charmed while watching the popular translated K Drama, Hospital Playlist, when one of the characters, Songhwa, looks up and sees the full moon and says, “I didn’t know it was the 15th!” in the same way we’d say, “I can’t believe it’s June already!” The seemingly less stable lunar calendar is logical and primary in Korea.
When I was living in Korea for a Fulbright and working at an unwed mothers’ home, I participated in a kimjang, a late-autumn ritual of mass outdoor production of kimchi for winter. With an almost shamanistic determination that the weather was about to turn cold, intersecting with estimations of the cheapest price for Asian cabbage, one day or two or three are spent in different outdoor spaces. It’s not all done on a specific day but is more like the intermittent synchrony of fireflies. You’ll just know when it’s time.
In Seoul or the countryside you’ll see men hauling mountains of cabbage brought in by farmers’ truckload, the women laughing and gossiping while carefully cleaning the cabbages and soaking them in brine, preparing the fillings over the hours it takes for the cabbage leaves to properly soften. There are special tubs the size of children’s wading pools to clean the cabbage. In the Seoul alley where I lived, the aunties used clean trash cans.
The job I was given for the kimjang was to peel the ginger, probably because little could go wrong with that. Still, an impatient auntie was aghast at how my whittling technique was wasting so much flesh. She grabbed my paring knife and showed me how to hold it perpendicular in order to scrape off the barest micro-layer of ginger-skin, to dig out between the appendage-like knobs as meticulously as one might wash between a baby’s fingers.
In America, access to ingredients has changed so much by modern technologies–we can get watermelon year round. In Korea, daily food life, such as the preparation of kimchi, has not changed all that much since the Joseon Dynasty. The only sign of modernization in this timeless ritual was the use of a hose to wash away the effluvia of red pepper, shrimp paste, garlic skins into the gutter. At the end, each of us were gifted plastic bags full of kimchi, the housewives transferred them to a traditional nut-brown clay onggi on their tiny city balconies to ferment.
Richer people have separate kimchi refrigerators that, like a wine cooler, keep it at a correct temperature: cold, but not freezing, not unlike the genius tradition of burying the onggi in the earth, which would also keep it at the right temperature, no matter the ambient temperature. The fermentation process preserves the vitamin C in the cabbage in storage, to nourish its eaters through a Korean winter, powered by winds from Siberia, just as long and as cold as anything in Hibbing.
My kimchi is salad-fresh but also funky with heaping scoops of salted shrimp, a bright red from the hot pepper. As my plastic bags ferment in my tiny office-tel one-room, it mellows into the kimchi I know. I eat heaps of it with rice, make a tofu stew when the weather turns cold. It’s so good that it doesn’t even last me to the sour phase when it’s delightful for fried rice.
I praise the ingenuity of my ancestors, resetting my cultural frame, remembering how my father restrained himself from eating kimchi when he was working (which, as the lone anesthesiologist in an isolated town, was often). Most people in our small town did not know what tofu was, much less kimchi, but the few who knew of it did not make favorable faces. My mother wouldn’t let us kids eat it, as she was worried about the smell and being bullied. The only other time I came across a reference to kimchi was when our babysitter was watching MASH, and the GIs saw some Koreans burying what is mistaken to be bombs ground, only for it to turn out to be even more dangerous in the western conception: smelly, funky kimchi.
* * *
The first signs of spring loosen the snow, the way the shortening days of fall loosen the leaves on the trees. We kids were delighted when spring really got going, the snowmelt would form miniature rivers and the smallest children tried to fish in these streams. We would build dams, sail paper boats, running along with them downhill. The other side was undeveloped “dumps” where wild prairie grass had somehow managed to grow, even though our hill was constructed from old iron mine tailings. Overturn a rock and you’d see not soil, but orange-red ore. Walking there would turn the soles of your sneakers a bright red. In the dumps, snowmelt pooled and formed temporary lakes.
I remember the delight when the first pussywillows appeared at the “lakes” fringed by cattails, those velvet hotdogs on sticks swaying in the wind. How, as the days lengthened, the soft fur of the pussywillows would give way to green knobs that would unfurl into leaves, the lakes grew smaller, the cattails would swell, like grandma’s antique sofa busting out foam at the seams. The smell of late spring, the heaviness of pollen, the hints of a hot summer, would smell of sex and reproduction setting off a happy restlessness that was almost unbearable.
* * *
With the warming earth, I wonder how kimjang will be affected, the erratic highs and lows, instead of the gradual, predictable march to winter. Will that affect the growth of cabbage? Will the warming earth render this backup method of storage obsolete? Unlike Americans, who laugh away weather extremes by frying eggs on car hoods and tweeting about it, Koreans note the unmistakable patterns, the climb of the yearly records. On the Korean news I see anxious headlines, “Weather forecaster warns of disappearing spring and fall,” i.e., the weather is very cold and very hot and nothing, really, in between. The emotion of these headlines, unlike anything I ever see in the US, also grips me with dread and grief for what is already irrevocably broken, and what is to come.
In the US, we don’t seem to react to the consequences of our own human assault on the natural world. In the Pacific northwest, mussels boil alive in their own shells. In our Minnesota neighbor, Canada, 500 people died in a heat wave this past June. The first climate change illness lawsuit was filed by a woman whose health—asthma and other ailments—have been caused by this new, wrong climate. In Minneapolis, where my mother lives, the streets have often buckled with heat in the summer—but also, now, in the winter, with cold.
I think about my son, who has autism and intellectual disability. If you ask him, “today is Monday, what is tomorrow?” he’ll pick one from the slot machine in his head. This, I get. The seven day week is a product of industrialization, the work week. I am realizing that the wonderful thing about Korea’s reliance on natural cycles, like the doctors in my K drama, means that even the most western-seeming people still keep track of the Lunar calendar, which forces you to look up into the sky. There are also no “leftover” days, like Leap Year, which need to be jimmied back in. Days progress, each erasing the last, with no remainders—going forward yet also circling back with the seasons.
When I ask my son, born into the new century, what season it is, he guesses. I try to give him mnemonics: Fall is when the leaves fall. Yet, it’s almost eighty degrees out, I am sweating in my office, and people outside walk by in sandals and shorts, a few in season-appropriate down jackets, but slung over their arms or unzipped. The leaves similarly seem to be hedging. Many decide not to leave the tree, until, instead of coloring, they just fall off green, in slightly rotten wads. What I thought was a massive color change on the mountains when I was in Aspen in September was actually a climate-change related fungal disease in pine trees that was turning the needles golden. The aspens were still green.
I think of the three years when my best friend was dying of cancer, how flying into Asheville was often stymied by various odd and extreme weather systems, how many texts I sent to her of weather delayed flight—how one day in late spring as I taught my class before heading to the airport, the clear afternoon suddenly darkened, the window we had wide open to the spring breezes suddenly filled with swirling drifts of snow, the students staring at my wheelie bag as if themselves wondering if I was going to make it, where I was going, as the wind screamed and the students struggled to shut the window.
When I went to Asheville for a last time for her memorial service, the road to the venue was dangerously, newly flooded, and I almost didn’t make it.
* * *
I suspect my son’s disinterest in the seasons is part of his intellectual disability. But also, like any neurotypical people his age and below, it is possible he doesn’t have a concept of seasons.
A few years ago at my high school reunion, I wanted to talk about climate change with my classmates. Growing up, Hibbing often made the national news in winter with jolly weatherman Willard Scott oohing about the negative temperatures in “America’s icebox.” Now, Hibbing has once again gained fame as the epicenter of climate change, an avatar of a phenomenon the National Climate Assessment labels a “polar switch”: colder areas warming even more quickly than warmer ones; our town experiences the largest temperature difference in warming temperatures over its 1906-1960 average.1
But classmates tell me to shut up, hurry and get drunk.
Now the seasons don’t smell like seasons. When I take pandemic walks with my son to the Harlem piers, the tang of gingko is just as often the tang of an ominous rot odor emanating from the sewer grates, even in the middle of “winter” (the quotes marking that it’s often 60-70 degrees). From time to time, it smells like monsoon season in Korea—but that also is not a smell of seasons, because Korea has monsoons, and New York City does not (or should not). But now we have climate change rains that seem like someone is pouring water straight from the sky from a huge bucket.
In fall, the leaves are never as crisp.
I want to make my son apple cider doughnuts but it’s hard to get in the mood when I’m sweating.
My son often says, “It is Mommy’s job to keep me safe.”
I am deeply moved by this trust, I take it as an “I love you.” He is dependent on me to protect him, and nothing makes me feel more helpless and sad than thinking of leaving him some day to this boiled-mussel hellscape. It’s because of him that I won’t stop talking about, reminding people what we’ve lost—with more to continue to lose.
As mothers we bring life into this world, but the even bigger question remains: what kind of life—and death—will we be consigning our children to, if we don’t take action? If we don’t try to reverse the very course we have set ourselves upon?
Endnotes:
1 Rising Temperatures (2014, May 7). The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/05/06/us/Rising-Temperatures.html
