Rebecca Novick

2024: 100 thousand praises

100 Things I Will (already) Miss When (as) the Climate Changes

  1. Knowing when to expect the rain

  2. Counting on a reliable supply of anything I could wish for

  3. Safe plane travel

  4. Prehistoric viruses staying frozen

  5. Trees on the side of the street that the city tends

  6. A system for sending things from one side of the world to the other

  7. Breathable air

  8. Sweater weather

  9. More where that came from

  10. A knowable future

  1. That part of 580 that runs right by the Bay

  2. A belief that a true crisis will bring people together

  3. Trusting that recycling is enough

  4. Electricity all day

  5. Saving for retirement

  6. Birds

  7. Bees

  8. Coffee

  9. Food security

  10. Replacement parts

  1. Fall leaves

  2. Seasonal produce

  3. The smell of the air just before it rains

  4. Thinking college is a good investment

  5. Believing a government agency could fix anything

  6. Public health

  7. Banks

  8. Value of an American passport

  9. Welcoming a storm

  10. Snow on the mountain tops

  1. Now in California I

  2. Have lost the seasonal rhythms if

  3. I ever had them it rains and sometimes

  4. It doesn’t sometimes it doesn’t rain for

  5. Years and even the trees wither but then

  6. Flood

  7. Last year the fog left us for two months and we wondered

  8. What would San Francisco be without its fog as we

  9. Looked at our phones to see if we could

  10. Breathe the air we had left

  1. Or what will I not miss when we change our lives:

  2. The way the sky turns those awful colors over Richmond when the refinery vents

  3. The extra layers of plastic on everything keeping us safe?

  4. How the beach is littered with garbage after a storm

  5. The smell of the groundwater rising where it shouldn’t

  6. The fear the fear that this one will be the big one the last one

  7. Worrying about almond milk instead of Big Oil

  8. Parking structures

  9. Suburbs

  10. Raising your kids alone

  1. Polar bears

  2. Beaches

  3. When I paid less attention to the weather

  4. Safe medicines I can buy at the store

  5. Other people taking the brunt of it

  6. Knowing my children will be better off than me

  7. Peace

  8. Monarch butterflies on their migration each year

  9. Familiar frost dates

  10. Topsoil

  1. Rainforests

  2. Elephants

  3. Snow days

  4. Fast everything

  5. Driving your own car

  6. Wishing

  7. Predictable growth

  8. Enough to go around

  9. Believing in progress

  10. Fish

  1. Growing up in Michigan I

  2. Could smell when the snow was coming I

  3. Could tell you which flowers would bloom when

  4. The crocuses pushing through the snow then the forsythia

  5. The bluebells wild across our back yard

  6. Lilac strong and sweet in June as the short spring

  7. Turned to summer and the zucchini piled on porches

  8. August corn and tomatoes and the quick fade to

  9. Blazing red maple leaves and the frost

  10. Returning just when it was supposed to

  1. Maybe I will miss having a new kleenex every time I blow my nose

  2. Throwing out the slightly frayed towel

  3. The convenience of disposable everything

  4. Plastic water bottles

  5. Plastic straws

  6. Plastic grass

  7. Driverless cars

  8. Empty buses

  9. Takeout containers

  10. Ziploc bags

  1. The idea that this is inevitable

  2. That this invisible hand we imagined together is real

  3. Believing deep down that this is what progress looks like

  4. That you are just somehow left out of the rising tide lifts all boats

  5. That you are in a different rising tide the one no one will name

  6. I will not miss the denial

  7. I will not miss the silence

  8. I will not miss performative recycling

  9. Or believing that revolution is impossible

  10. That it is all downhill from here