The Geese Are Heading To North Carolina

Don't tell me we aren't all connected

(The geese are heading to North Carolina)

I stand in a cozy room, admiring the harvest of winter squash

Safety, I think. Security this Winter.

The frost came late, too late for the potatoes,

the tomatoes

Who were all impacted by blight,

A strain of whom is remembered as the killer of one million people, the reason two million emigrated, the reason when you hear ‘potato’,

You think ‘Ireland’

But they didn't die of blight.

They died because of us.

Because humans thought ‘landlord’ and ‘land’ go hand in hand,

Claimed terror of terroir was a given right

Haven't you heard? There was food in the fields of Ireland, there was food

Within reach of starving children

But there were British in the fields of Ireland

There were bullets, fired to reach those starving children

Back in the root cellar

I flip drying nettle leaves, the deep green a joy

I pluck a few, carry them down the stairs to the kitchen

I'll make tea

While I text my friend Carson

He evacuated two days ago, cramming bunnies and cats into a tightly packed car,

driving away from an island to his mother's house

Still in Florida

Still in the path of Hurricane Milton

But with enough booze and weed, he says, to ride out the storm without the panic-inducing fearscape overwhelming his psyche

I don't remind him that weed won't stop the waves

I am messaging another friend, Alex in Mississippi

Alex almost moved to Appalachia, it'd be closer to friends

Alex isn't in the path of Hurricane Milton

I sip my tea

My mother's ancestors smuggled potatoes across the St John River, somewhere near Edmundston, Quebec

I don't know them all that well - 200 years puts a damper on those relationships - but what I'm thinking is that they could still rely on frozen rivers,

that they were able to ignore climate change

They weren’t calculating which varieties to harvest

before blight hit their seedstock

Because an Autumn drought in Northern New York is a consequence of colonialism

And an Autumn drought

brings blight

But I know some of my ancestors, at least, are why I am here. Not just here (sitting) - but here, where the culture in which I pretend to live

is killing my potatoes

As surely as the British killed children

They were fracturing human to non-human relationships long before

climate change

Splintered the ecological patterns

That would have stopped blight in their tracks

Long before I cried in the fields

Long before I cried in the fields

So now, the government is releasing fact-checking articles about

Hurricane Helene

A category four major hurricane with one hundred and twenty mile an hour winds

That slammed into Southeast North America with an intensity not seen in nineteen years

The storms are getting stronger

The climate is changing faster

The human death toll is at two hundred thirty and rising

And Milton hasn't yet hit

I will keep calling,

keep texting,

keep growing food

I will send care packages

I will build relationships

I will break

The geese are heading to North Carolina

(North Carolina is under water)