The Future Is Green

This evening, I learned that Ian is something of an anti-structuralist; he strongly disapproves of the construction of houses. He was telling me how beautiful God's creation is, how wonderful nature is, how bad parts of cities can be, and then he mentioned the problem with the construction industry:

"Making houses... is hazardous to animals, like the marble-backed salamander."

I have no idea where he got the category of marble-backed salam]ander; I suspect maybe Mommy was listening to her beloved NPR in the car and Ian perhaps internalized a concrete point of dogma. But I can vouch that this is no small issue, because Ian loves salamanders. He has often listed them among his favorite animals (perhaps his very favorite species/genus), and in fact, because both Daniel and Ian drew out the design of our design-your-own-mailbox, the mailman is treated daily not only to Batman (D), but also to red salamanders (I). [The red-backed salamander is Ian's very favorite; it was a red-backed salamander that brought Ian to tears as he elected to let it go, rather than keep it as a pet, after I told him that lizards don't lasts very long in captivity.]

I concurred that the devastation of nature is a very bad thing, and for that reason, I was reluctant to buy an entirely new home when we were house-searching, the most recent time around. But I told him that I also believe that people need to live in houses. [Things have changed since I was 18 and the difference between a lien-to at the foot of the Golden Gate bridge and a youth hostel in San Francisco was that in the latter scenario, you wasted seven precious dollars and you didn't get to wake up to the sound of the ocean...]

At that point, Ian set the record straight. People, in fact, do not have to live in houses, because they can live in trailers. This is an interesting historical reprise, because when Amy was pregnant with Ian, and we had to give up our wonderfully inexpensive one-bedroom apartment in favor of more family-friendly quarters, I eagerly pointed out to her how overwhelmingly better-off we would be if we had to pay a mortgage on a mobile home, rather than on some icky free-standing, immobile structure. I guess men just understand these things implicitly....

(September 7, 2010)