How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming - Mike Brown [86]
After cat, Lilah next learned flower. Flowers (scrunch up nose as if sniffing) were everywhere, first only outside on plants, but soon she generalized to flowers on her clothes or her shoes, or in pictures in books and magazines. I wanted to hook up wires and do experiments and comparisons and studies to understand it all.
“You want to do what?” Diane would say.
But, really, who wouldn’t? In our own house the most extraordinary thing in the universe was taking place, and it was passing by unexamined, unstudied.
“There will be no Lilah experiments,” Diane declared.
I know, I know. I wouldn’t really do it. I didn’t really want to hook up those wires. Mostly I just wanted to hold Lilah tight as she made signs to the world around her, and I wanted to tell her: You are the most extraordinary thing in the universe.
We had recently bought a new house. For the first few years of our marriage and the first six months of Lilah’s life, we had lived in a diminutive Spanish-style bungalow in a typically densely packed part of suburban Pasadena that I had bought years earlier. I loved my little bungalow. It was the house where I first cooked dinner for Diane. When Diane had moved in, I had warned her: I love this place and never want to move.
But the house had almost no sky.
I biked home at night through lit streets, car headlights glaring everywhere. I thought back to the days of living in the cabin and walking the trail by the light of the moon or stars; I thought back even earlier to the days of living on a tiny sailboat in the San Francisco Bay and staring up at the whole sky before finally closing the hatch for the night. From my bungalow, I could sit in the hot tub in the backyard and look up and see slivers of sky. Sometimes I could see the Big Dipper, sometimes Cassiopeia. But in my tiny night-sky universe, I never once saw a planet.
When Diane suggested that we probably needed to move to a bigger house to fit our now-expanded family, I reluctantly agreed. Maybe it was time. I grudgingly went to look at a few places with her. Nothing felt as perfect as our happy little bungalow. Then one day, with no expectations, we stumbled onto a house perched on top of a massive one-hundred-thousand-year-old landslide. Almost nobody knew it was a landslide, but I had made my geology students write about it nearly a year earlier. How could I not have fallen in love with the house? We bought it three days later and moved in the following month.
Living on a landslide has its advantages. We have a steep canyon in our backyard, because canyons are easily formed in rubble. We have landscaping boulders of every conceivable size and composition, and if we ever have the need for more, we just dig a foot underground to see what else the landslide brought down. The landslide makes a minor wildlife corridor, so we have an abundance of birds, an occasional bobcat, and even once a black bear.
For me, though, the best benefit of perching on the tip of the tongue of a landslide with the mountains rising to the north of you is that you have an uninterrupted view to the south. And if you go outside at night and look to the south, you get to see the spectacular constellations. You get to see Orion and Taurus and Scorpius. You get to see the blue of Sirius, the red of Betelgeuse. And best of all, you get to see the planets.
Lilah and I have spent the years since we’ve moved to our new house