“If You See Me, Weep.” And Other Souvenirs of Climate Catastrophe

My great-uncle and his wife had no children of their own, and sometimes, when I was little, I would spend the night at their place. Uncle Lyonya indulged my babblings, and Auntie Anya baked me sweet and savory pies and let me play with her collection of Baltic amber necklaces—sun-warmed souvenirs of her annual summer migration from a featureless postwar high-rise in Leningrad to Latvia’s seashore splendor. I was in awe of these fossilized bits of tree sap, how they trapped Eocene debris and dehydrated mosquitoes and 44-million-year-old bubbles of air weighted with greenhouse gasses. I worried them like prayer beads.

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