​My name is Jay and I caused global warming.
     It was the winter of 1996.  This was back before we used ominous words like 'global warming' and 'climate change.'  We called it greenhouse gasses then but that sounded like a good thing.  Who doesn't love a greenhouse?  And gas?  We loved gas.  Gas was good. 
     I was in my cabin cleaning the kitchen when I found, by smell, a plastic bag that contained the raw bloody juices of a salmon I had cooked a week earlier.   I stabbed this nasty fish bag with a fork, held it at arms length, and said, "I am not going to wash this."  I walked over to the wood stove, opened the door - and here's where it happened - I threw the stinking plastic fish bag into the flames.  
      Within the week I began hearing the terms global warming and climate change in the news.  No more with the cozy greenhouse gasses, now it was the the real thing, the beginning of the end.  It was no longer just a theory, it was happening.  What had tipped the scale I wondered.  What had been the last straw?   Then the hairs on the back of my neck bristled.  I remember it so clearly.  I was sitting in my green easy chair eating buckwheat pancakes when the answer came to me like a bright and shining bolt of absolute, indisputable truth that I felt to the very marrow of my bones.   It was the fish bag. 
     Obviously I can't take all the blame for global warming.  I know that within a trillasecond it would have been someone else who tipped the scale.  Global warming was going to happen whether or not I burned a stinking fish bag, but because it was this act that was the final straw I became the unwilling poster child for climate change.  
     Of course, only I knew this and I kept quiet.  Still though, imagine how I felt.  I'd turn on the CBC and hear the headlines:  Polar bear habitat threatened by global warming. "Oh no," I'd say. "Not the bears."  Penguin colonies dying off due to global warming. "But I love the penguins," I'd cry.  I felt so bad.  I took on all the guilt and shame and sadness.  I was global warming's poster child and it was my cross to bear.  It had to be someone.  
     The newspapers never let up.  I'd turn on 'As It Happens' on the radio and listen to the horrible things I do to hammerhead sharks and monarch butterflies, the three toed sloth (it got slower), and the lesser-crested jibblywink of Greater Zambozia.   The list went on and on and on.  I'd even effected the California wine industry.  "Oh no,"  I'd yelp. "Not the grapes, too."  
     I was  so sad.  Look at what I'd done to all these poor creatures.  I'd filled their good lives with fear and cancer and death.  Eventually the news was too much for me.  I stopped being sad and instead became irritated.  "Enough already," I snapped at the radio.  "Stop harping at me.  You're always harping at me."  There's nothing more I can do to atone.  I live in a tiny cabin, I catch rainwater for the house, I use a solar panel, I don't drive, I eat roots and berries.  I can't live more simply.  I even compost my own shit, for god's sake.
     I thought about coming out then.  I needed people to know what a blow this had been to my sense of self and maybe they would have a little compassion for the position I was in.  I didn't want this job but now that I have it everyone hates me.   My self esteem was in the gutter as you can well imagine.  There are no support groups for the poster children of global disasters.
     But I didn't come out then.  I was too scared.  I imagined revealing my secret at a press conference in Ottawa.  Immediately after I'd be whisked away for an exclusive interview with Peter Mansbridge.  He'd smile warmly and say, "I'd like to thank you for coming in to the studio today to talk with me, Ms. Warming.  Or may I call you Global?"  And, of course, I'd want to be friendly so I'd say, "Just call me Glo', Peter. All my friends call me that."  Then Peter Mansbridge, who had seemed so warm and friendly in the green room, would say, "But do you have any friends, Ms. Warming?"   
     I imagined looking down at my shoes, my lower lip would tremble.  "Well, no,"  I'd mutter.  "I'm Global Warming.  Nobody likes me."  The very first question and Peter had come out on the attack.  I was so naive.  
     There was also my own physical safety to think of.  If I came out how would the world treat me?  Would I be tarred and feathered?  That was a good old fashioned punishment.   But of course the tar would be an issue, being a product of oil and carcinogenic.  You couldn't champion the environment and then use toxins to do it.  Molasses, that may be the solution.  Organic Blackstrap Molasses and feathers.  But the feathers would likely come from a factory farm and molasses isn't local.  Honey, then.  Honey and thumb tacks.  But the vegans would come out against honey.  And the tacks, well, nobody likes taxes.  Another committee would be formed, and another, and another, and there would never be consensus.  I knew I would be safe.  Environmentalists can't make decisions.  They're too sensitive.  
     
     So I'm coming out now.  To hell with all your stupid penguins and polar bears, screw your B.O. emissions or whatever the hell they're called.  If the world thinks I'm bad then, dammit, I'll be bad.  "Oh but what about the tree frogs?" you breathy environmentalist flakes will say.  I don't give a rat's patoot about the tree frogs.  Get away from me with all your flapdoodle and hoo haa.  You can't hurt me anymore.  I can burn you all to crispy bits of long pork and your David Suzuki can't help you now.  Where's the DDT, wheres the agent orange?  Everyone has a bottle of Round-Up or Draino or Killex in the back of the cupboard under the sink.  It's the guilty secret that has been tucked behind the unbleached paper towels and the biodegradable dish soap and the rusty SOS pads for 20 years because you don't know where it should go.  Give them to me and I'll spread them hither and yon like a toxic, modern day Johnny Apple Seed.  And that moldy foam mattress that's been been taking up space in my shed for 18 years because it's not allowed at the dump?  Burn baby burn.  When I go to the outhouse I'll drive.  And I won't even carpool to get there.  I'll burn coal.  I'll harpoon whales.  I'll squash bees.  And I will always, always choose plastic over paper bags.
 
My name is Jay and I am global warming.

Wayne Rainey - April 15, 1994 - November 3, 2006
Wayne was an incredible cat and he deserves an obituary. In the spring of 1994, in my bed at a float house in Cocktail Cove, he burst from the loins of his mother the stray, who showed up one day all charm and good intentions, but failed to tell me she was in the family way. 

Two days after the kittens eyes opened the mama went hunting. Later I looked in the box where the kittens were crowded into one corner, frightened and hissing their tiny hisses. In the other corner (kitty corner you might say) was a huge dead vole. They barely had teeth yet and their mama was bringing them fresh kills. I thought they'd all be in therapy when they were older. My mother left dead things in my bed, too, and look how I turned out.  

Although Wayne was more of a mouser, in his early days he caught some birds. So when he felt like hunting I would go out and sit with him. I'd say, "I will always give you good food, I will never abandon you, and the birds just want to be free like you and me." I put the pictures in my mind and reinforced this daily.  I let him see my sadness when he killed a bird. Eventually I would find him asleep under a blooming lilac that was abuzz with hummingbirds.  

When a day-old, orphaned hooded merganser duckling joined our home, Wayne went against instinct and joined the journey. I have no pictures of them together because every time he extended his gentle nose to her she'd go for his eyes. 

I learned I could trust Wayne implicitly, and together we raised many chicks and foundling wild birds. He allowed Beedoop, the baby robin, to share his window shelf, no cage, and they would sit together for hours watching the bluff.

​One morning I awoke to Wayne sleeping beside my head with Beedoop asleep on top of him. A baby flycatcher came to us one spring, and when I let it out of its enclosure for the day it flew out and landed between Wayne's paws on the bed. I left them there, nose to beak, and went to the kitchen to blanch the morning mealworms.
 
In my magical backyard I feed dozens of wild birds, and Wayne would sit among them. They knew he was on their side and fed around him on the ground, but if another cat came by they would fly into the trees and tick angrily. They differentiated.

Wayne was my best friend (sorry Kathy, you're just my second best friend), my significant other (though not in the biblical sense - he was neutered), and the one who showed me that humans and non humans can communicate on a more complex level. It just requires respect, attention, and curiosity.
 
After Wayne died I spent the next two days building the meowsoleum. I schlepped heavy boulders to make the walls for the new garden. I lugged huge flat rocks for the stairs leading up to it. I made dirt.  I used to think a labour of love was something you did not because you had to, but because you wanted to. Now I know it is much more. It is hard work that drives you up through sadness.  It's a way to spend grief.

Wayne was sick for a month, though only really uncomfortable on his last day. The night before his death I wrote about his incredible bird spirit, and that I would bury him with feathers. By 4:00am he was gone and I placed him on his window shelf. With only a candle lit, I went to my stereo to play the song I'd been singing lately and associated with our experience together. On top of the stereo there was a wren. We watched each other, and after a moment I said, "Little wren, I have to put you out." I reached forward and it flew to the desk. I went to get it there and it flew to the shelves, and finally came to rest on Wayne's body. I stood before it, now knowing why it had come. I reached out and it let me hold it. I nudged the door open with my foot, opened my hands, and the wren flew up into the starry, predawn sky.
​
Wayne is survived by Gumby and Pokey (the rescued African pygmy hedgehogs), Little-Chicken-Who-Loves-Me, Pearl (who spent a month trying to hatch an oyster shell), Flabbergastia, Little Black Jewell, Spot, Speck, Sam, Our-Lady-of-the-Outhouse, Big Bertha, and Tiny - chickens all. Also Dead-Eye Dick, One-Eyed Wanda, and Tail-Free Freddy - damaged raccoons that feed alongside the chickens by day, though I wouldn't trust them for a minute after dark, the deer I raised and my many grandfawns, Sable the llama, Beedoop the robin, herds upon herds of wild birds, me, and these two magnificent ravens who watch over us all.