Introduction
I am so excited to present the works of nine members of the Writers Alliance of Gainesville, Florida, in our Climate Memoir Writing Prompt. The goal was to write a 300-500 memoir about a climate-inspired experience.
This presentation of the writers’ works appears on The Hogtowne Quille, the Writers Alliance of Gainesville’s Blog.
These pieces are also featured on the Gardens of Global Unity/Climate Collaboratory website. They will be part of the world celebration of the 11 Days of Global Unity, which concludes on September 11, the United Nations International Day of Peace.
Our participation in We, the World’s 11 Days of Global Unity is part of their greater agenda to bring grandiose ideas like climate change to an easier-to-grasp understanding at a human level. As the Earth Charter says, “We are one human family and one Earth community with a common destiny.”
Thank you to all those who participated and if you couldn’t write a piece for this exercise, I hope you can participate in WAG’s next writing adventure.
Authors and their works
- Sue Blythe, On the Road to 2030,2050, and Beyond
- Barbara Bockman, My Climate Memoir
- Ben Coward, Magic of Nature
- Jenny Dearinger, Memories of Birds
- Nancy E. Dohn, Midnight Magic
- Mallory O’Connor- A Perfect Storm
- Charlotte Porter- Jigsaw Puzzle: Challenge of Change
- Marie Q. Rogers- When We and the Climate Were Friends
- Rob Rogers- The Winter the Manatees Died
On the Road to 2030, 2050, and Beyond
Sue Blythe
I remember the utter shock of seeing that first picture of the Earth from space, sent back from the moon in 1968. There we all were, on that one small, fragile planet hanging in the blackness of space. Every classroom globe I’d ever seen showed the countries of the world in pastel colors. As a child, I spent hours coloring the borders and boundaries on blackline maps with my favorite colored pencils. Then suddenly, as a college student, I saw the Earth, our home, as a unified whole, with white clouds hugging the shimmering blue planet.
I dove into the environmental movement of that time — the first Earth Day in 1970, the legislation for clean air, water, and soil. Later, I took my young children on beach cleanups and fed them a diet for a small planet. I was concerned about the changes I saw happening throughout my adult years — pollution, loss of habitat, extinction of species — and taught reduce-reuse-recycle lessons in schools and communities with the sure knowledge that we could do better. I knew vaguely that our planet was warming, and it would affect future generations. I told the children in schools and communities that what we did now would affect their great-grandchildren.
My understanding of global warming abruptly changed for me in 2013. I took an online course on the Scientific and Spiritual Dimensions of Climate Change with four friends. We received reading materials during the week, and got together on the weekend to discuss what we were learning. I had never heard any of the scientific predictions of what would happen as the planet warmed. I was horrified to learn that my father’s oil company was actively engaged in promoting disinformation about global warming, even though their own research in the late 1970s confirmed the impact of fossil fuels on climate change. Having grown up with the privilege afforded by the oil industry, I felt a personal responsibility to do something significant to reverse the damage done.
Through the years, I’ve explored the many ways our human family is learning to live in harmony with nature. For more than a decade, a children’s story has been growing in me to help my nine grandchildren understand the way I see the world. In my imaginary world, fictional characters engage real people in the spiritual process of building community for a sustainable, just, and peaceful future. Our collaborative storytelling adventure takes us on the Road to 2030, when we win the United Nations’ Global Goals, so that we can reverse global warming by 2050, as we learn to live together in peace on and with the Earth.
As local people tell individual and collective climate stories, we connect in many ways to the global networks of like-minded organizations with a common vision of a healthy, peaceful planet for many generations to come.
My Climate Memoir
Barbara Bockman
I have witnessed a number of climate events in my 86 years on Earth. As a schoolgirl in the 1940s in rural North Carolina, I walked to the school bus pickup point looking at the distant beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains. The summer greenery as well as the white winter snowcaps thrilled me as few sights have thrilled me since. I credit those enthralling mountains with the beginning of my love of nature.
In 1950, I was excited when my grandparents and I went with my aunt, uncle, and two young boy cousins to tour Craggy Cardens on the Blue Ridge Parkway. That was another thrilling sight—walking among the huge rhododendron bushes bulging with clusters of vivid pink flowers towering over me.
Then, a number of years later in the mid-1970s, when I had young children of my own, my family went past Craggy Gardens all the way up to Mt. Mitchell (the highest peak east of the Mississippi River). This time, the sight was not thrilling, it was dismaying. Acid rain from the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys was eating away at the trees, bathing them in sulfuric and nitric acids, and depleting nutrients such as calcium and magnesium from the soil. The sight would bring tears to your eyes.
But fortunately, the Environmental Protection Agency which was formed in 1970 provided some relief. The implementation and enforcement of the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act helped the forests.
Now I mourn the demise of the EPA. The Earth is resilient, but only up to a point. I have not returned to Mt. Mitchell recently but looking unto those hills at images online show a beautiful restoration of vibrant greenery. I cringe at the thought of what might happen if we do not continue to protect our natural resources and hold corporations accountable for their contributions to climate change.
The Magic of Nature
Ben Coward
Starting at an early age, I fell in love with the magic of nature, with two memories remaining distinctly vivid in my mind. The first memory is my family and I venturing to the zoo to see the animals. I believed that the animals would wondrously know I was coming and would be excited to see me.
The second was going outside before school every day to hear the birds. I would attempt to mimic the hawks, crows, and mourning doves, though I can’t say I did justice to their beautiful songs. The morning flight of the birds was something magical and helped inspire me to get a bachelor’s degree in environmental science.
The belief that nature is magical is wondrous. There should never be a child without the same opportunity to feel these things. Magic and wonder are paramount to children as it propels them to learn and grow. Giving a child the freedom to dream and wonder is a true blessing and one that we should strive to provide them with every day.
In order to keep the magic of nature alive in our children’s lives, we must strive to maintain healthy ecosystems. One way we can learn about the health of an ecosystem is by observing the birds. As an indicator species, they help us identify if an ecosystem is healthy based on density and diversity present. Sadly for the past few years, I have noticed fewer and fewer birds flying between ecosystems, indicating that these ecosystems are not as healthy as they have been in the past.
Just like birds moving between ecosystems, many land and aquatic animals do the same. However, this movement can be disrupted by habitat fragmentation and lead to unhealthy ecosystems. An area where we can easily see the effects of habitat fragmentation is Paynes Prairie, specifically where it is split by highway 441. According to Jim Weimer, an estimated 500,000 animals were killed in just five years crossing the highway. To combat this tragedy, an Eco passage was built on November 1st, 2000, with 7 additional tunnels being added in the following years. Though statistics would seem to show that these Eco passages have been successful due to a decrease in roadkill, the Eco passages force animals to use the paths to move from one side of Paynes Prairie to the other, allowing predators to easily find a consistent stream of food. Thus these Eco passages are only a band aid and don’t truly solve the decreasing health of the ecosystem.
Though things seem grim, I want to leave you with a word of hope. This fight to save our planet is not hopeless. Efforts to save animals like the bald eagle and the American alligator are success stories. These stories show us that if we put our minds to it, we can make great strides in the right direction. So let’s come together and keep it a wild world where our children can continue to look at the magical world with wonder.
Memories of Birds
Jenny Dearinger
My little brother was a finicky eater. All he would eat were hotdogs and pickles. Then in the summer of 1968, when he was three and I was five, Asheville, NC got its first McDonalds. John fell in love with their hamburgers. There was nowhere to sit inside. Mom would order at the counter, and we would eat outside on benches around cement picnic tables under striped red and white umbrellas. What I remember most were the birds. Tiny sparrows hopped among the picnic tables and around our feet. It seemed there were hundreds of little, curious, chirping birds waiting for French fry handouts and crumbs. I have continued my fascination and passion for my feathered friends.
When I was six, my dad’s career with the US Army took us to Germany. In my memory, it was always cold, and we played indoors a lot. Many times I looked out the living room window and watched the starlings. The flocks were as thick as black clouds. There must’ve been thousands of birds in the murmurations. They danced and swirled to a rhythm only they could hear, something a genie might conjure. I was completely hypnotized every time I saw them.
I married in 1998. My wedding was on the ocean’s edge at St. Augustine Beach. The seagulls and ocean wading birds laughed and cheered. Flights of pelicans soared across the sand. They were good omens.
But where are the birds now? My husband and I love to drive, and we have driven across this wide country several times. There are no more sparrows in parking lots or fantastical clouds of meandering starlings. The beaches are barren. I was at St. Augustine Beach in June of 2025. I could count on one hand the number of seagulls standing one-legged on the sand.
People say, “Oh, the birds have found places to live where there are fewer people.” If only that were true. In the past 60 years, billions of birds have disappeared from the skies.
There may be a myriad of reasons that the birds have all but disappeared. Almost all the causes have been manmade, from acid rain and fertilizers to habitat loss to temperature changes due to animal and methane production and chlorofluorocarbons (Freon) in refrigeration units have affected the loss of millions of birds.
My wish is for my grandchildren to experience the same thrill of watching large flocks of birds as I did when I was young. The only positive take away that came from the world’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 was that we got to witness the earth repairing itself. In the two months that airplanes were not allowed to fly and people had to stay home, the nitrogen dioxide emitted by car and plane pollution was reduced by 60%. Of course, two months is not enough time to bring back the birds, but it gives us insight and hope that change is possible. Maybe my wish will come true.
Miracle Midnight
Nancy E. Dohn
Winter hit early that year. Right after Thanksgiving. Not with flurries…but a hard freeze. I was hoping for snow. Big, luscious flakes that would pile up overnight and cause schools to be closed.
But here it was bedtime Sunday night and nothing but stars across the sky. My dad said it was too cold to snow, as I kissed him goodnight. No clouds. No precipitation. No snow.
He always had an explanation for everything, but sometimes he was wrong. Just maybe, while we slept the weather would change. Clouds would form and burst open, covering everything with white drifts so high cars would be buried.
No cars. No transportation. No school. I drifted off to sleep hoping I would wake up to a world of white. Instead, I was jolted awake by my dad’s voice yelling up the stairs for me to get up and come down immediately. The bedside clock said 12 a.m. Really?
There was an urgency to his words, so I dragged myself out of my warm nest, threw sweats on over my pjs and ran out of my room. I stopped halfway down the stairs when I saw him at the bottom grinning eagerly, holding my parka, hat and boots.
We were going outside. In the middle of the night. In freezing weather. My look was all question. He handed me my things, turned and waved to me to follow, rambling on about there was something he wanted to show me and that we had to hurry.
My 15-year-old mind did not want to follow my father’s folly. I wanted to go back to bed. But he gestured again at the front door, so I zipped up my jacket and headed that way, regretting my decision immediately when I stepped onto the front porch and the frigid air slapped my face and brought tears to my eyes.
Whatever he had to show me, better be worth it. Hunched over and stomping my feet to keep warm, I joined him in the middle of the front yard, unimpressed thus far. Then he pulled my hood back and wonder met my eyes. I had been transported to some magical place akin to Oz.
A dancing curtain of vibrant colors had been pulled over the night sky. Ribbons of emerald, amethyst and midnight blue pulsated overhead in shimmering arcs rippling slowly across the star-filled heavens. The Northern Lights. Aurora Borealis.
I was mesmerized. It was a ballet of light and energy, and the sky was its stage. Violet pirouettes swirling in one area. Aquamarine strands dancing a pas de deux in another. The colors undulated rhythmically, moving to the sound of a universal orchestra.
But there was no sound. Not even a whisper. Just the breathing of two humans standing on a front lawn in Michigan. Awestruck. Humbled. Feeling exceedingly small.
Gently, the lights began to fade. I noticed the tingling in my fingers and toes from the cold. Silently, we headed back into the house. Words had no place.
Before burrowing back into bed, I looked out my window hoping to catch one last glimpse. Only the night sky and Orion met my gaze. All was calm.
It was a different scene in my mind. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw vibrant colors swirl and twirl across the heavens over and over again. But eventually, they began to fade away, and I felt myself float off with them.
A Perfect Storm
Mallory O’Connor
Usually, I enjoy thunderstorms—the drama of the roiling clouds, the energy surge of the lightning, the cacophony of the thunder—but this time, this ONE time—it was very different. It was terrifying. Microbursts are thunderstorms on steroids. I found that out the hard way one balmy afternoon thirty years ago.
I heard the thunder first—low growls and rumbles, like an approaching hungry beast. Lightning sizzled on the horizon sending out flares that vibrated off the darkening clouds. But I wasn’t worried. It was Florida. In the summer. Get over it.
But as the beast approached, I could feel the energy in the air. The trees began to lilt and shudder. Then they began to bend and dance, waving their arms and rattling their leaves. I stood looking west out the kitchen window, watching the storm advance toward me. Looming up like a tsunami, a towering mass of darkness.
“Honey?” I called to my husband. “Come take a look at this.”
I heard his footsteps but didn’t turn. I was mesmerized by the spectacle of the storm.
“Good lord,” he said softly, putting his hands on my shoulders. “What the hell. . .”
Then as we watched, frozen in time and space, the roof of the screened porch peeled away and went airborne.
“Come on!” he yelled, giving me a push. “Let’s get to the hall!”
We ran across the living room and crouched against the wall of an interior hallway. I could hear the nails in the roof above us straining to hold on.
Then there was a crash, as though the thunder had invaded the kitchen. I watched in disbelief as shards of glass hurled themselves across the dining room and exploded against the wall. Thunder boomed like an exploding bomb and the whole house shuddered. My husband grabbed me and held me close. “Hang on,” he said breathlessly. “Hang on.”
I closed my eyes and waited, imagining what might be next. Would the roof blow off? Would the walls collapse? Would we be able to escape?
But then the roaring faded, the shaking subsided, the howling beast moved on and we carefully detached ourselves from each other and crawled to the end of the hall to take a look at the damage.
With a sigh of relief, we slumped back against the wall. The roof was still there. The walls were intact. Even the trees outside the dining room window were waving to us through the rain. We gave a collective sigh of relief and looked at each other. “Little too close,” my husband said. I nodded. “Yep.”
It took a month to finish the repairs. The screen porch was replaced. Roof shingles were repaired. The neighbors found one of our porch chairs a quarter mile away at the edge of the prairie. One tree was down and had to be removed.
We found out the next day that it was a “microburst,” a powerful downdraft in a thunderstorm that is usually less than two miles wide. They can produce winds up to one hundred and fifty miles per hour and cause as much or more damage than a tornado. And yes, climate change is very likely to affect the intensity and frequency of microbursts. I just hope that I never meet one again. One microburst was one too many.
Jigsaw Puzzle: Challenge of Change
Charlotte Porter
Childhood pastime of a 1000 pieces
links supposition and lost vision.
The cover photo?
Aerial, late winter landscape,
stalled moments, old snow, elk herds.
What, wrong box?
Blue edge, the corner of what —
pintail duck, lake, porch door?
Dark streaks — mussed hair?
or, dead mussels, ash borers, ag run-off.
Those knobby holes
of moles, voles, mole crickets?
Out there, used to be,
despite a tabletop jumble
I dump, do over and pat down —
pasteboard mash-up of somewhere else,
missing many pieces —
wetlands confused with absence of life.
When We and the Climate were Friends
Marie Q Rogers
In the 1960s, few people in Florida had air conditioning. I lived in a Cracker house with lots of windows which allowed cross breezes for cooling. In the early 1970s, I taught in schools which were not air conditioned. One wall in each classroom had large windows which could be opened. For a cross breeze, we would open the door on the opposite side of the room. Fortunately, school let out for the hottest months.
People who are addicted to air conditioning forget that our bodies are designed to manage temperature changes. When we’re too warm, we sweat. If there is a breeze, it evaporates the sweat, which cools the skin.
Besides strategically placed windows, how did we survive the heat? In those days, the climate was still our friend. A typical summer day saw the temperatures climb into the late afternoon. Then a thunderstorm would cool the air, giving us relief which lasted through the night into morning. That’s how we survived without A/C.
In the 1980s, the weather pattern changed. One summer, instead of hot sunny days tempered by daily thunderstorms, nearly every day brought hazy skies. I was glad to have air-conditioning then. This pattern lasted for years. Only recently have we seen the return of afternoon storms.
Other things have changed, too. Country people used to predict the date of the first frost by when the dog fennel bloomed. I tracked this for years, noting the date of the first bloom and, counting forward six weeks, marking the anticipated frost date on my calendar. It was surprisingly accurate.
One year, the first frost came, not in November, but later, in December or January, and it has been the same since. Dog fennel still blooms, but the weather no longer follows its lead. Frosts also come later in spring. Fruit trees bloom on schedule, only to be nipped by late freezes, which means a poor harvest, if any.
Love bugs still appear twice a year, in May and September. At one time, I could set my calendar by them. When the first love bug splattered on my windshield, I knew it was either May 1st or September 1st. Now, they’re confused. A few will venture forth a week early, and occasionally I’ll spot one out of season.
These local observations are only a microcosm of worldwide disruptions. In a balanced nature, plants bloom or leaf out at a certain time, then insects hatch and feed on them, in turn providing sustenance for birds and other wildlife. When these schedules are interrupted, plant material and nectar are not available to insects and birds at the right time. This leads to the loss of not only individual organisms, but entire species.
If we and the climate are no longer friends, whose fault is it? The climate is only trying to adapt to changes we caused. We should do all we can to help it find a new balance.
The Winter the Manatees Died
Rob Rogers
Each winter my daughter and I go to the magical strip of spring fed river at Blue Springs State Park, where a herd of manatees graze just below the surface of the sun-kissed ripples dusted by pollen and morning fog. Below the riverbanks where hundreds of nature lovers like us flock to see them, the manatees usually appear in such vast numbers on cold February mornings that you feel as though you could skip down the river on their backs. But in the first winter of Covid, almost all of the manatees were gone, and those that had made it to the springs were gaunt and emaciated.
I’ve gotten used to seeing the forests where I backpack bulldozed to make way for strip malls and gated subdivisions, so it shouldn’t have hurt so much to not see the manatees that winter, but somehow it burned a hole inside me. The springs have always felt like a source of rejuvenation, an altar for purification from the sins of the modern world. Far from the blaring portable speakers at beaches and the endless lines at the theme parks, the springs are where I return to the natural world to feel alive again. And the manatees have always been there, even after ozone depletion, superstorms nitro-charged by heating oceans, and oil slicks in the Gulf of Mexico. But this time they were not there, and their absence shook me.
“They’re starving,” a park ranger told me. Heated by global warming and fueled by the runoff of phosphate-enriched fertilizers, the intracoastal waters had exploded in blooms of algae that sucked up all the oxygen relied upon by the plants and animals that live there. Among the devastated were the beds of seagrasses that sustain the manatees. The huge shallow waters where they graze had become barren underwater parking lots, leaving the slow moving and temperature-sensitive manatees to starve and succumb more easily to diseases, including neurotoxins caused by the algal blooms. Throughout the prior summer, among the endless mats of dead fish could be found too many carcasses of manatees.
They’ve come back a bit in the years since. A young marine biologist I met while backpacking near Melbourne told me of his work planting beds of filter-feeding oysters to cleanse the Indian River of its pollution. And the disappearance of the pretty sea cows did seem to upset enough air-condition addicted suburbanites to call for action, even after they had been unmoved by the destruction of wildlife corridors or the starvation of the Everglades. But still the water temperatures continue to rise, and still the forests are burned and the wetlands are drained to build more golf courses with manicured fairways that excrete asphyxiating fertilizers into our waters like coal-belching steel mills. The manatees are here today, but will they be gone tomorrow? I can’t help but wonder if they will remain long enough for my grandchildren to see.
Higher Power
David Forest
The power went out around 4:00 a.m. I had only gotten a few hours of fitful sleep. A foreboding rain pelted the window. Now it was just a waiting game.
Fear can be both subtle and sudden. I hadn’t really felt it until I lay there in the dark. I suppose there had been a level of anxiety underlying the intensity of the last two days, but there hadn’t been time to think about it. Maybe the way a boxer feels before a bout. I thought of Ali and the rope-a-dope, covering up and absorbing the blows. That’s all we could do.
Less than forty-eight hours had passed since our trip to the grocery store on Saturday. The checkout lines stretched down the aisles. Shopping carts were filled with canned goods and Sterno and bottled water. Something about a storm approaching.
I had been through hurricanes before. A few branches down. No big deal. Earlier in the week, the meteorologist mentioned something about the first storm of the year out in the Atlantic, but I hadn’t really paid attention.
It was 1992. “Hurricane season” wasn’t even a thing back then. It would be another thirteen years before Katrina ushered in the modern hurricane era, with storm tracks, computer models, and the Saffir-Simpson scale becoming part of our consciousness. Not to mention “rapid intensification.” We were about to meet the poster child for that. Andrew.
Florida hadn’t seen a Category 4 or 5 hurricane since Donna in 1960. This one was still a Category 1, but it was predicted to strengthen, and Miami was in its crosshairs. Michael, my brother-in-law, was living on Miami Beach and would be more vulnerable, so we urged him to ride out the storm at our house, which was south of the city and more inland. He was still asleep when my wife called him on Sunday morning, a note of panic creeping into her voice. “Michael, you need to get over here.”
The chances of finding any plywood at Home Depot were slim to none, but our windows needed to be boarded up. Fortunately, Michael had a degree in mechanical engineering. He eyed the shadowbox fence running down the side of our back yard and said, “Get me a crowbar and a hammer.” Several hours later, we had covered the windows on the south and east sides of the house with pickets wedged into place by two-by-fours. This would prove to be impenetrable against the onslaught.
We were battered relentlessly by the northern eyewall and were left without electricity for seventeen days. The National Hurricane Center, whose instruments were literally blown away as the storm came ashore, later upgraded Hurricane Andrew to a Category 5, one of only four such storms to make landfall in the U.S.
In its aftermath, our neighborhood was unrecognizable. But the fences that had separated us from our neighbors were gone, leaving us with a new appreciation for each other, and renewed respect for the power of Mother Nature.
Final thoughts from Jenny Dearinger, Special Coordinator
Congratulations to our writing members who are making an impact in the fight against climate change as they bring forth their unique voices. Thank you to the Climate Collaboratory for helping WAG design this challenge for our members. We hope to work with this wonderful organization again to bring writing opportunities to our creative members.
Jenny Dearinger