Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(37)

We even have our own little legend that anyone you’re angry with, at cross-purposes with, has misunderstood or misunderstands you, if you make up with them at Christmas, you’ll have love the whole next year.

I knew, even before I finally left home after earning my PhD in Microbiology and accepting a postdoctorate position as a research scientist far away from home, that I’d always spend Christmas with my mom.

No matter what happened, or what was going on, what either one of us was dealing with, or who, we’d spend as much of the holiday together as we could.

We share the same philosophy, which is that whatever it is you’re doing, you do for love. Your work, the friendships you extend, the person you fall for and hope is the one—start with love.

Even the hard things, the things that seem impossible.

I’m a scientist, a microbiologist, and my very favorite slide is Staphylococcus aureus Gram-stained, its glowing crystal violet under a very modest 1,000x magnification.

In my work, I’m surrounded by some of the rarest culture samples of bacteria in the world, with some of the most sophisticated methods at my bench to look at them, but my favorite are still those perfectly common purple spheres.

Staph was the very first bacterium I ever saw, bent over my Swift Optical in AP High School Biology. My face got all hot while I slowly adjusted the stage, then the coarse focus, then, when all I could see was still a blur and I tried to figure out which eye to squint and which one to open and why I kept seeing my own eyelashes, I cranked the fine focus in frustration and then—

Oh.

Me and staph, love at first sight.

I’ve been lucky in love.

As a little girl, I loved school. I loved figuring things out.

I loved the books, the other kids, and my teachers.

My mom raised me on her own, and because she was still a kid herself, she was my first best friend, and we did everything together. She taught me about friendship, and how to overcome some of the worst kinds of challenges. Because she had to get a GED and work her way through college with a baby and a little kid, when I was in college and ready to see the world, she was too, and we traveled together.

When she told me I could do anything I wanted, I believed her.

She knew, because she did everything she wanted, and did it all with a kid.

I love my work.

It’s not easy to be a woman in the sciences, but ever since I fell in love with my microscope and the world I could see through it, I was determined.

Test scores and my love of school meant I had choices when I graduated from high school, but I chose the University of Washington, in my own hometown, because they had the best bench science for their graduate students, and even as a college freshman, I had my eye on those labs.

Just before I left home in August, left Seattle, left everything familiar and well explored, my mom took me to breakfast and asked why I wanted to be a microbiologist.

It’s not that she isn’t proud of me.

In fact, she’ll tell anyone who will listen about how I was on a design team in graduate school that integrated a special camera in a particular kind of electron microscope, how we had captured a poorly understood step in the process of phagocytosis.

She’ll go on and on about that, like I won an Oscar for it.

It’s that she really wanted to know, she wanted to know before I moved away from her, left everything I knew behind.

My mom is connected like that, she wants to understand why people do what they do and love what they love. She writes poems, love poems, poems about all kinds of love.

If I was willing to move two thousand miles away from my mom, from the sea and the mountains, from the view I had always seen through every window, she wanted to understand, and I wanted her to.

I love her, and I love my home, and my friends and the work I’ve done here, but I needed to explain to her how it wasn’t that my world wasn’t enough, it was that my love of my home had showed me how much more of the world there was that I hadn’t seen.

The possibility that there was even more to know, and to love.

“What is it about it that makes you so happy, Jenny?” she’d asked over coffee, the very last day before I moved from Seattle to Lakefield, Ohio, where one of the biggest bacteriological laboratories was housed within the biological-sciences campus of Lakefield State University. “Tell me how it makes you so happy and maybe I won’t miss you so much.”

I had looked out over the water trying to find the words so she would understand, because I knew she absolutely wanted to, and my mom, a poet, was all about words. “It changes the way you see the world. Like—so I see, say, the sound.”

“Puget Sound?” My mom had leaned way over to listen close.

“Yeah. Just like it is now, steel blue and kind of choppy and it’s totally beautiful, I know because you’ve written a million poems about this exact view.”

“I have. It is beautiful.”

“So I see it, just like today, beautiful and huge and majestic. But then, I get to thinking about how it’s a little cold today. So I wonder how this changes the relative temperature of the water in the sound, and I imagine phytoplankton and zooplankton, and try to remember everything I know about cyanobacteria, because they’re so awesome and this pretty blue-green color. So, temperature, is what I was saying. I think, if I took a sample right now and did a simple wet mount, what would be there? What if I took another sample on a warmer day? And then what if I did that for a year?