1. There was something familiar and comforting about being in the woods, familiar because I had grown up around here and comforting because, for a few minutes, it was easy to forget about the rest of the world and its many problems.
2. My brother and I had spent the trip across the state ranking the worst industries: for me, it was automobiles, whereas he put pharmaceuticals at the top of his list. But then we remembered plastics. And chemicals. And banks.
3. Later in the weekend, my brother recounted the mental games he used to play while walking in circles around a parking lot near his school, jumping from barrier to barrier. As I listened to him, I had a disorienting sense of having my own memories being excavated and described by someone else. ‘What are you talking about?’ my mother asked. ‘The obsessive personality traits we inherited from you,’ I said. We all laughed. In a way, it was comforting to think about some of my obsessive qualities arising outside of a gay context: it made me feel closer to the nonhomosexual members of my immediate family (which is to say, all of them).
4. We went to the recently opened Pittsburgh Botanic Garden in North Fayette Township, which — like so many towns around Pittsburgh — was a place name I had heard many times, but wasn’t quite sure I had ever been. The hills and valleys are a disorienting, haunting mystery for anyone who hasn’t lived here ‘at least sixty years,’ as my mother reminded us. The Pittsburgh Botanic is still very much a work in progress, but I was encouraged by the enthusiasm of the staff and volunteers. The world is on the brink of collapse and people were gardening: it seemed like a reasonable choice. A highlight was the lily pond, which a few years ago was filled with toxic runoff from a nearby coal-mining operation. I tried to focus on the lotus flower and not think about all of the fracking sites we had passed on the way here. (Or the confederate flags.)
5. The next day, walking through a different woods (Boyce Park), I wondered if anyone else in my family shared my lifelong love of ferns and moss, but decided it was a question I didn’t need to ask.
