Life is Crisper, when viewed with gall and vitriol

I had to google the gall wasp in order to teach my kids whence came these tawny speckled orbs, thin crunchy balls that appear to be a growth on the oak leaf but are, in fact, the tree itself, leaf cells grown out of two dimensions and into a sacred sphere at the kiss of a gravid wasp (no male needed here) to become a nest, cocoon, first food for developing larvae.

So Mom, you’re saying these are made out of wasp spit and leaf DNA? Cool! Gross, but cool.

The galls litter the ground under our oaks, discarded and fallen once the new wasp has eaten her way free.

And we gather them in a wicker basket.

***

Maybe you heard it on the news, or caught it in your Facebook scroll like I did, the 2020 winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Or, maybe you don’t watch the news, maybe you’ve left Facebook to founder without your eyes on it in these too-twisting times.

And maybe you celebrated, with the feminists, with the scientists, with progress, the first all-woman team to win this prize, for CRISPR, the magical new tool for gene editing. For cleaning up our DNA, for repurposing our twisting ladder of being, for editing the spirals that make us so. For “rewriting the code of life,” as the articles say, popped out in bold and black.

Or, maybe you missed it. Maybe another headline, one that my eyes skimmed right past, made you sit a little heavier in your chair, clutch your morning coffee tighter, made your heart race with the ghosts of those earliest moments of this particular brand of knowing.

***

You’ve seen, perhaps, the blurry black and grey of an ultrasound in the second trimester of pregnancy, its encrypted truth interpreted silently by the kindly technician, to be later passed on to the radiologist, and then later still to your midwife, and then, cozy on your green living room couch over a pot of tea, to you. But have you seen, five months later, those same indecipherable shadows, but this time they’re your daughter’s heart, on the outside of you now, riddled with holes? And have you seen her DNA?

A row of squiggly socks lined up just so, 23 neat tight pairs, orderly x’s all in a row. With one to grow on, if you look just there, at number 21, where duo becomes trio and there’s just enough extra to scramble that baby to a perfection all her own.

Or, you may have never met a geneticist, might not know what it is to have your baby parsed into a grand list of all the things she may not do, all the ills she may live through or die from, to have heard it all before she’s taken a full day’s complement of breath.

***

As I explain genetics in its roughest form to my two children, the one who has been probed so deeply sitting on the forest floor, crushing oak galls alongside her brother who has made it ten whole years with no deeper scrutinizing of his inner workings than that mid-gestational ultrasound, I think of those prize-winning women, dyad of destiny with magical microscopic scissors, snip and stitch, snip and stitch, paring the pieces down to size, crisper than they were ever meant to be.

I think of the class I took, back in high school, where we made recombinant drosophila melanogaster DNA—back before everyone was doing it, back when Jurassic Park was just a quirky sci-fi novel, back when Dolly the sheep was but a glimmer in the eye of a mad Scottish scientist, back when the human genome was still on the part of the map beyond the dragons. I think of how I feared, even then, this power.

If my 16-year-old hands, armed with a pipette and ill-fitting goggles, could disassemble, reassemble, dye purple, the very building blocks of life, what would we wreak, with the passage of time?

I thought of that class, too, when the midwives on the green couch, over tea in my living room, offered to test my blood for hints of genetic anomaly in my baby, whose cells were mingling with mine, coursing through me, when we were still one, she and I. And we said no thank you to the tests, David and I, sitting in front of our wood stove on a rainy January afternoon. It wasn’t, we figured, our job to meddle. We had done our part, to make this baby. The rest of the story was hers to write, even then.

Snip and stitch. Snip and stitch.

***

At first glance the more tawny, less speckled orbs might be puff balls, 10-year-old’s treasure, and he stomps them before picking them up, which will, in fact, help later, when it’s time to pulverize them—this violent word that shares a root with Spanish’s polvo—dust so light and airy. Do you know about the Romance languages, I ask? No, I don’t know why they call them that. I’m sure I would if I thought about it, but I digress.

(Digress is what we do in this life now, where I am mom and teacher and chef and fairy godmother. Where I am their joy, their pain, their grief, their solace. Where all the pieces of me spread in the disarray of everyday and I pull sense out of the sunlight that filters through the trees, attempting to pass some shred of wisdom, maybe a little knowledge, maybe some tiny glint of truth, on to these people I made.)

***

RC: oh look, the scientists behind CRISPR got the Nobel Prize.

Further evidence 2020 is the most 2020 year ever.

AB: Fuck fuck fuck, the fucking fuckers.

I learned about the CRISPR prize from a Facebook post from a disability advocate friend. And responded with all the grace, as seen above. This friend works in influential circles, is a whole lot more connected and eloquent than I am when it comes to putting words to these things. As someone who lives with a genetic quirk, rather than just parenting one, she is a bit more practiced at putting the words together to make the important people listen, but even she didn’t have anything to say to the later commenter who asked—

FB: not looking to offend, of course, just to understand, and I don’t expect you to do the labor, but could you just point me to an article to explain why these magical scissors are an assault to your very humanity, any of you people whose karyotype comes from the second half of the genetics textbook, the part where they explain the deletions, replications, transmutations, the very fiber of all of us.

(Ok, maybe what she really said was something along the lines of: not looking to offend, of course, just to understand, and I don’t expect you to do the labor, but could you just point me to an article that explains what’s wrong with CRISPR?)

And someone answered, something like this:

FT: CRISPR is a new and more accurate way of altering genetic code. In theory, it could be used in humans to remove or add genes that cause genetic disabilities. Or it could even be used to modify the human genome to control other traits too that aren’t considered disabling.

And the conversation from there remained civil in its discourse, and people learned things, maybe, and yet outside the disability section of my newsfeed, the celebration continued. Women! Science! Prizes! Progress! One step closer on the path to perfection!

Those some people decrying, further down the page, the rise of fascism, the presidential nods to Nazis, the threat of dehumanization everywhere around us these days.

***

We gathered the galls then, my kids and I, into a wicker basket, crushed them between two stones carried here on the rush of a broken ice dam, all the way from Montana, once upon a time.

Crushed them until we had the thirty-five grams called for in the modern writing of the ancient recipe, added twenty-one grams vitriol I ordered weeks ago as ferrous sulphate off some sweet etsy shop, added all that to half an ounce of gum arabic dissolved in half a pint of water, lacking in wyne as we were, and shook it all up in a mason jar where brown turned to black and a chunky frothy ink was born. And we painted with pine needle brushes, scribbled spells with a calligraphy pen, made mess of hands and jeans and forest floor, out there in our woodsy classroom, in the shade of trees their grandfathers planted.

***

They’ve won a prize, these scientists. Vaunted. Cheered. Rewarded for their labors.

Like, somehow, women—wasp-waisted, pear-shaped, straight-as-a-board—haven’t been rewriting life all along.