Alexandra Marshall

Alexandra Marshall graduated from Wheaton College and Columbia University with degrees in French. She is also the author of Gus in Bronze. She is married to the writer James Carroll and they reside in Boston.

The problem for every species is how to ensure the survival of the succeeding generation. Still Waters, 1978.

Hawks glide on currents for whole migrations, and so do butterflies, placing themselves like luggage on conveyor belts of air. Ibid.

. . . to stay alive, just to keep on hanging in there as a nonextinct species, a generation has to do more than reproduce itself once and a half. The casualties are unbelievably heavy by human standards, which both goes without saying and must be said. Ibid.

Already there's a cellophane layer being laid over us, out in space. It may take a millennium before it grows opaque enough to obscure us, but it will, eventually. Ibid.

Billions of years ago, in what was doubtless the boldest evolutionary stroke ever, green algae "invented" sexual reproduction. Now there are over thirty thousand species of algae, ranging from one-cells to the giant kelp which is capable of growing to two hundred feet. Ibid.

Snakes eat tadpoles but, as if comeuppance, bullfrogs eat snakes. Ibid.

What a risky business spring is. A wood-duck mother takes its brood cruising, and seven miniaturizations paddle after in file. A pickerel grabs one of them by the feet and jerks it under, and then there are six. Ibid.

Spring is a table presided over by a stone-faced croupier, taking in the chips with passive disinterest. The house will win in the final accounting. One knows this and bets in order to play. And risks and loses nothing, or everything. Ibid.

. . . I treasure almost everything, as if the pond were a giant junk shop and I its loving proprietor, who overprices everything so it won't be sold. Ibid.

The earth evolves and every species adapts, and sometimes considerably, in order to exist. And we are the new kids on the block. Ibid.

I have watched the pond go about its business and only now, nearly at the year's end, does it strike me with force that I haven't been participating. The pond is ancient and I am only an embryo. Ibid.