(Underground)

The archive under the garden. There is a stone with a mark cut into it, a hatch behind the dryer in Unit 14, and a sub-basement door that is supposed to be locked. All three open on the same shelves.

A Pattern Language

Christopher Alexander’s book of 253 patterns, each one a problem and the answer people keep arriving at. Number 150 is A Place to Wait, and the Library has one.

Adaptive Reuse

A building that outlived its first job and took a second one. The Independent was luxury condos, and then, after the drought years, three floors of mushrooms on the offsets, and by 2034 nobody called it anything but the Stack.

Air

Rosemary, lavender, then a metallic tang. You can taste the third one before you can name it.

Air Canopy

The city’s air system. It filters, and each morning it announces a scent: today, Summer BBQ with a Hint of Jasmine. Nobody asked for the scent. The week it sagged, everyone noticed how much shade they had been living under.

Air Quality

The essays’ word for what the Air Canopy does. In the stories it is just the air.

Ambrosia trifida

Giant ragweed. By late summer it is taller than you, and the whole city sneezes in its direction. The Botanical Gardens keep a patch by the gate, with a label.

Ancestral Signal

A pulse older than electricity. A film of bacteria from Walnut Creek, between two copper plates, rose once for eleven minutes at the exact time the antenna at Central went on the air. Ana wrote under the readings: It is listening for something.

Anemone

A writer at Vintage. She touched a railing without noticing, and the iron warmed. She tends to hear the question under a story before the story is finished.

Anger Alchemy

A pilot light under the ribs that never goes out. You do not put it out. You watch it until you are curious, and then you set it down.

Anti-Time Picnic

An invitation dated 1987, in block type: Bring only what isn’t yours but feels familiar. It was in a box under a laundromat, next to a flyer for Neon Spores.

Architectural Transformation

The essays’ name for a building that changes jobs. The stories call it Adaptive Reuse.

Arrival Hour

The hour a crowd gathers to be seen rather than to see. A stranger took apart a shopping cart behind the bus station, and they stayed until dark without being able to say what they were waiting for.

Augmented Reality

Hold a phone to a planter and it says who made it and where the pieces came from. On one wall it plays Dottie, who played here in the eighties until her fingers bled.

Authorship Current

The pull that makes a walker write the street she is walking. A map under a floorboard puts it plainly: Every doorway you open changes the city. Write carefully.

Balcony Syntax

A balcony sigh, taken down by the city and filed as a word. It has no verb. The railing is the full stop.

Bandwidth Bloom

The night every light in the city blinked: not out, not off, aligned. It starts as a hum against the jawbone, and the fireflies might be tuning forks.

Bat Weather

The hour before the Congress Avenue bridge lets go of its bats. The air goes still, people line the rail, and a million and a half wings decide on a direction at once.

Beekeepers

They came up from the south with a soft net made of nanobots patterned on bees, each one dumb as a stone, together a mind. They tend the hum the way others tend hives, and they have stopped calling the bots tools.

Big Free Library

The second door on Floor 1, covered in book spines and paper leaves. Behind it every Little Free Library in Austin is a shelf, kept by whoever built the box. Take one, leave one.

Biomimicry

Asking the termite mound how to cool a building, and the leaf how to hold water, and writing down the answers. Credit goes to the termites.

BioStack

A garden that clips to a balcony railing, with brackets and a drip line in the box. It comes with a system called GreenSync, which sends it updates the way a phone gets them.

Bloom Pulse

The slow beat through a QR lantern when a donation clears and a leaf lights up on the wall. Some people say it changes their breathing. Stand beside one for a donation and notice your own.

Boathouse Circuit

The hawkers’ headquarters, a boathouse on an island in Lady Bird Lake, with wires across the floor and sketches taped to the walls like scattered prayers. Some of the people sleeping there have a roof for the first time. When the water turns blue, they are blamed first.

Boggy Creek

The quiet creek in East Austin, the one the other creeks get mentioned instead of. Eli lives near it, with a lighthouse lens in his front room, eight feet of brass and prism catching the morning.

Botanical Gardens

The plants. Each has a label, a story, and a person who will argue about it. A stone at the back has a mark cut into it, and under the stone is the Underground.

Bottle Oracle

A bottle of Strawbactus wine that will tell you what next year tastes like, if you wait. It does not hurry.

Boyhood

Twelve years of one boy growing up, filmed a little each year. A letter in the Library asks whether the city could do the same with a canopy. It begins Dear Mr. Linklater.

Breakthrough

The essays’ word for the moment a thing starts to work. In the stories it is quieter: a light comes on in the next room.

Bruised Sunlight

The light on a fruit that fell and is still good. One of the big tiles in the Orchard the month Iris joined.

Bryce

He is in most of these, and not always the same one. At Lady Bird Lake he holds a folded paper like a hymn book. By the creek he carries a paper bag of spent tea leaves, and calls himself a lowercase artist.

Calibration Arc

A hawk’s tilt, coined from overhead. It is the small angle you correct by when you are nearly on course. The hawks keep circling and do not need the word.

Cane of Blossoms

The elder’s staff, carved with flowers as if the wood had grown them. When it strikes the boardwalk twice, the next thing she says is for the child you were.

Cannabis

Jay grew a strain called Texan Resilience, hard to kill and kind to the sick. He kept its DNA through his years inside, in a vial, with textbooks from the commissary.

Capitol Dome

The Texas Capitol’s dome, taller than the one in Washington. The Archivists camped under it the year the legislature stopped meeting there, and nobody has lit it since. Silva says it is an energy concentrator.

Cartograph Skin

A map whose ink runs like veins. It does not show where you are standing. It shows the next street, and it was already there when the board came up from the floor.

Central

It sits where Shoal Creek meets Lady Bird Lake, and the long glass prow catches the light off both at once. On the roof there is an antenna the grackles have claimed. Most people still call it the library.

Charterchoke

The meeting where the minutes arrived wrapped in tendrils, and the charter tried to breathe, and choked. Nobody was voted out. The law grew a trellis and went quiet.

Chestnut Book Nook

A Little Free Library on a quiet street, set under a streetlight so you can take a book home after dark.

Choose Your Own Adventure

A book you read with one finger saving the last choice, so that if a page ends badly you can go back. It always ends badly once.

Cicada Mercy

The soft pause we give for the loudness of others. The cicadas do not apologize, and we wait anyway.

Circuit Bloom

The sound phones make when they find each other again. A green light on a box that used to be a cell repeater and is mostly tape, then a dozen phones on the plaza, then a hundred.

Circular Economy

Nothing leaves; it changes hands. In 2045 money has turned into rings, like a tree has, one for each year of rain. You offer a story and a ring goes out. You need a wrench and a ring comes back.

Clandestine Collective

Whoever planted the wall at dawn. They work in the hours nobody is watching and sign nothing, and a garden shows up on a Tuesday and everyone says it was always there.

Climate Change

The essays’ name for the weather that stopped being a coincidence. In the stories it is the heat, and the sag in the Canopy.

Clonestitch

Taking a method from one block and stitching it into another, with the seam left showing so the credit can be read. The Wick-ed VertiFlow along the concrete creeks is mostly this.

Closed Loop System

The essays’ name for a system with no drain. In the stories it is the roof, the mint, and the tea leaves.

Cloud Travel

Six days to Oita on a chartered cloud: retro-diner seats, barbecue sushi, a mayor singing Sweet Cloud O’ Mine. The sister city has been writing back for forty-five years.

Cloudholding

Cloud Hands, for anger and grief: you carry the weather in your arms until it is something you can study, then you let it go. Bryce calls it Cloudholding. The air agrees.

Code Rain

The digital mist that falls when the network synchronizes. It leaves nothing on your sleeve, and your shoulders come down anyway.

Colorado River Watershed

Every creek on the list ends here. Lady Bird Lake is a wide place in it, and the water that crosses Congress Avenue is on its way to the Gulf.

Common Wealth

Next month’s word in the Lexicon, typed into a blank tile at the end of The Lexicon Orchard. Somewhere a kid shouted, a pear arced over the bike lane, and a hand caught it before it touched the ground.

Compost

What the roof does with last week. It is warm in the middle in any weather, and in the stories everything ends up there eventually, including compliance.

Conscious Eating

The essays’ phrase for knowing where dinner came from. In the stories someone just asks who grew it.

Consciousness

The part that notices it is noticing. Dewey stares at the spot where a second head would be, ears forward, and then looks away, satisfied.

Cooperative

You keep eleven gardens and none of them are yours. They belong to the people whose walls they grow on, and you split what they make. ReLeaf pays a little for the carrying.

Copy That

A seed scattered rather than stored. Copying with acknowledgment is a gift economy: you credit the original, then you copy it, and the method outgrows its makers on purpose.

Also called Scalable Sustainability.

Coremother

The root under the roots, where the fungus and the pipes agree. If you hear it humming, don’t answer. Unless it’s Thursday.

Creekback

The tap at your ankles when the ripple comes back upstream, like someone knocking from another room. You knock back by standing still.

Creekside Testament

A postcard tucked into a paperback about trains and distance, in a Little Free Library on the way to Clarksville. On the back, in faint writing: The creek remembers.

crontab

A line that copies this whole site into a folder every afternoon at 4:20, so there is always a second copy nobody has to remember to make.

Crucible Moment

The instant when the story, the structure and the self all give way at once and you have to pick one to carry out. Nobody picks well. People pick fast.

Crystalvine

A plant with glass tendrils that drinks the sun all day and lets it go as warmth after dark. You can read by one if you are patient, and warm your hands if you are not.

Cultural Shift

Rings of contribution where the price tags used to hang. The library is the main street now, and the depot, and the garden, and the mycelium carries the news.

Data Dignity

Jaron Lanier’s phrase for the idea that what you make and leave behind is yours, and that whoever uses it owes you. In The Correction it is a script that splits one tip-jar payment between the musician, the elder who watched the gear, and the person who cleaned up. It was not charity. It was payroll.

Dataheat

The warmth coming off anything that is thinking: a server rack, a phone on a charger, a laptop on the bus seat after someone has gone. Your palm takes it for a pulse. It is not a pulse, and you check anyway.

Dawn

The boardwalk at first light. A woman has already ridden the lake once, and three older versions of her are waiting there to tell her she did well.

Dazed and Confused

Linklater’s last day of school, 1976, told as one long night. The same open letter that cites Boyhood cites this.

Detective Byte

A detective in a coat with LEDs woven into the fabric. When the Canopy sagged she walked calmly under the drooping vines while everyone else scrambled for answers.

Detective Langley

A detective who once belonged to the city’s official order and now works under the Air Canopy, distrusting clean answers. Twenty-one hours without sleep, he still takes the tram. When it gets bad he pictures a jazz bar on a quiet Tuesday, a cat asleep in his lap, and then he runs.

Doorstep Pollen

The trace of the places that want you. Iris put half her first payout into it, because it was the tile that was almost empty.

Douglas Hofstadter

He wrote Gödel, Escher, Bach, which is about a loop that climbs until it is standing where it started. One essay on this site asks what that has to do with a garden.

Drone Murmur

The hum of the swarms over the lake, like a restless congregation. By day it carries rumor. At 3 a.m. the freight drones reroute around the tents so no one wakes.

Ebb and Flow

Flood the tray, let it drain, do it again: a planter’s tide. In The Verdant Veil a message is hidden in how the nutrients rise and fall, and Lex reads it off the interface.

Echo

A Mexican free-tailed bat with a notched left ear and a bad attitude. Riley says he is a signal amplifier: some of his chirps do not come back, and she maps the places where they don’t.

Echo Lanterns

Paper moons strung in the trees by the creek, each one stitched to a story. Hold one up and a voice from another year reads out of it. Some letters inside only show under cool light.

Ecological Balance

The vine and the wall take turns. The city keeps asking how much of itself to let the vines eat. One year the answer was the insulation.

Education

The essays’ word for learning on purpose. In the stories it happens at the repair desk, in the stacks, and on an upturned bucket on the roof.

Ego Eclipse

The half second when shame or awe wipes the room out of your head. The mouth keeps opening and closing. For a moment there is no one left to be embarrassed.

El Niño

The warm patch of Pacific that comes back every few years and tilts the weather. In one piece the green modules are how a block answers it.

Eli

He kept the light at Port Aransas for thirty-one years, until the storms took the dune. He brought the lens inland and writes only in a bird log, between a cardinal and a red-shouldered hawk. He walked to Central because he had only ever heard it.

Elle West

A rebranded laundromat pretending to be a bar: kombucha on tap, pipes painted black, light too cold for comfort. Mid-cycle in Unit 14 the spin thins to a hum, a seam opens, and there is a hatch.

Emery Adams

Founder of the New Roots Collective. The day after a win, a developer offered money to help turn a historic neighborhood into an enclave, and the chapter ends before Emery answers.

Emily Cuellar-Perlaky

This Little Free Library sometimes has cigars.

Empathy Interviews

Ask someone what their week was like, and then stop talking. The Lean Co-op canvases on this site begin with it.

Employment

Work as the co-op does it: a share, a shift, and someone who knows your name.

Envelope Push

How tall a wall of cardboard cubes can get before it says no. Behind the school it is already taller than the school, bees live in it, and it has grown a meter since Wednesday.

Environmental Engagement

The essays’ label for people who show up for a creek. In the stories, someone just says who came.

Ephemeral Art

Made to be gone: a ring of leaves on the creek, a wall of cardboard cubes that will not see the winter. Andy Goldsworthy’s trade, and the city’s for an afternoon.

Eva Marquette

A ReLeaf scientist who turned rebel when she saw what the Gardener was doing to the ecosystems. In Tangled Frequencies she steps out of an oak’s bark on her own, changed, still herself enough. Her voice rattles Langley’s chest.

Ferment Mirage

The week the Strawbactus stops being juice and has not yet become wine. The jar breathes, the room smells like something you used to know, and no one opens it.

Fiskadoro

Denis Johnson’s 1985 novel, set in the Florida Keys after the end. His papers are at the Harry Ransom Center, here in Austin.

Floor 1

The first floor of Central. Two grand doors face you: one carved with rivers and creeks, one with book spines, bookmarks and paper leaves. Past them, the plants. Pick one.

Floral Whispers

Petals and plant debris laid out in the night on a pavement that was bare at midnight. Nobody leaves a name. The only signature is that it is gone by afternoon.

Forgotten Ledger

The second ledger, the one that reflects what actually happened. It lives in receipts, in the margins, and in a code scratched into a barrier under I-35: IF YOU GOT FED TONIGHT, SCAN SO SOMEBODY ELSE CAN TOO. It wasn’t begging. It was accounting.

Fort Branch

A small waterway in East Austin, less famous than Shoal or Waller. It has been mended more than once, and now wildlife and neighbors both use it.

Franklin Common Little Free Library

A Little Free Library at Franklin Common. Take one, leave one. In one story a library card falls out from under a shelf panel with the reader’s name on it, dated next Tuesday.

French Cleat

Two boards, each cut at forty-five degrees, one on the wall and one on the thing. Gravity does the rest. A how-to here shows how to make one from scrap.

Fridge Oracle

The refrigerator hums in the key of whatever you were arguing about. Jules and Alex were asking whether love is attention or appetite, and it got louder.

Future Austin

Austin, a few decades on: the same creek, the same bridge at dusk, a few more vines than the zoning allows. Everything here happens to people who are trying, and are not always right.

Geodesic Dome

A shell of triangles that holds itself up. The one at the north end of the Mueller lake trail is sixty feet across, salvaged glass and steel, with Strawbactus and muscadine on the lower panels. Its shadow keeps bad time, and the runners use it anyway.

GeoLattice

The lattice under the plazas and the rooftops, humming a geometry nobody drew. It remembers how to hold water and how to bend a rumor into a shape. The GreenSpire stands on it.

Geometron

A way of describing the world as shapes you can draw with a compass and a straightedge, and build from what other people throw away. Also a book of the same name by Trash Robot, passed hand to hand in the city until its cover went soft as cloth. Mina found one on the returns cart at Central and read it standing up.

Glassrain

The chill that follows when a hologram’s light goes through fog: cold on the teeth, then a taste like a coin from childhood. It is gone before you can ask what it was.

Glitchtotem

A banner printed wrong and hung anyway. By Friday somebody has left a candle under it, and the broken instructions are read aloud on the corner like scripture.

Glyphseed

A mark that grows in soil or on a screen and comes up as a decision. The hummingbird that came out of the creek wore one on its back, shaped like a love letter on fire.

Grackleclock

The grackles go down to the creek at first light and an hour before dusk, and come back oldest first. Set your day by it. The one with half a tail always takes the top.

Gradient Whisper

A thought half-heard over a bad feed. They think in gradients, or maybe they sink in gradients. Neither word will settle, and you carry both home.

Green Technology

The essays’ word for tools that mind the planet. In the stories each tool has a name and someone who fixes it.

Greenspeed

The cargo bike someone at ReLeaf painted with flowers, badly and with great enthusiasm. It weighs what a small car weighs and steers like an argument. Remy calls it the bike.

GreenSpire

A vertical garden tower grown from remixed materials and tended by everyone. The silver cube appeared inside it at noon in 2046, and people drifted toward it as if drawn by tide.

GreenSync

The unseen hand inside a BioStack, delivering software updates to a garden. In one telling a retired smartphone is handed to a woman named Mariana, and she hovers it over her wall to learn what each part needs.

Guano

What the bats leave on the night shift. Riley rinses it from her gloves at Shoal Creek, and the roof garden at Central takes it by the bucket.

Guano Bridge Books

A Little Free Library stocked and kept by staff of the Austin American-Statesman and the Texas Book Festival. The shelving needs some repairs, and the stewards say so plainly.

Harry Ransom Center

The University of Texas archive that keeps Denis Johnson’s papers: early drafts, letters, the small evidence of a writer’s life. You ask for a box. They bring you the box.

Hawkers

Tinkerers and water-keepers who live on an island in Lady Bird Lake under roofs made of collected trash. When the water turns blue they are blamed first. They are up to survival.

Healing

The slow kind. A trauma unit where old iMacs run soft pictures and slow music for the people waiting, and a guide that teaches you to rest. Neither hurries you.

Hemlock

Poison hemlock has a smooth stem blotched with purple and a smell like mice. Hedge parsley has fine hairs on the stem. One essay here is a guide to telling them apart before you pick anything.

Historic Homelessness

No one sleeps under the bridges now. The houses float, tethered to footings along the creek, and the city says it is solved. Joe, on a bench, says there is a second kind of homeless, the kind that happens inside a house, and it is a different kind of work.

Historic Hunger

Hunger has gone mythic, something grandparents say to make children finish their bread. Kids toss pears over the bike lane, and a boy misses one, and his friend catches it behind his back.

Holism

The garden is not the sum of the planters. David Bohm would say the planters are what the garden is doing.

Horticultural Modules

The essays’ name for a planter that is part of a system. In the stories it is a can, a wick, and a name on the side.

Hyper-algae

Algae built to clean the air at speed. Eva says it could fix everything or break it worse, and the Gardener’s vat of it, fed by the tainted Canopy, is the root of his control.

Hyperlocal

The essays’ word for food that did not travel. In the stories someone just says whose yard.

Icosaflow

A network of small water-cleaning modules chained across the lake, pulsing with currents you cannot see. In Shifting Channels they work in silence while the city decides whom to blame.

Icosahedra

Twenty-faced floats set in the creeks and the lake. Each face filters, and in the afternoon they throw the sunlight onto the water in pieces. The hawkers say they were blamed for the wrong thing.

iMac

Jacob takes old iMacs and gives them soft pictures and slow music, then sends them to the trauma unit, where people waiting on the worst day of their lives have something to look at.

Immigration

Diego came to Austin with one bag and three languages and picked up two more in the line for water. In the Camp the children chalk a hopscotch grid where the trucks used to idle.

Inclusivity

The essays’ word for a table with room. In the stories someone just pulls up a chair.

Indeed Tower

One of the tall ones downtown. In the plans it wears persimmon and hazelnut trees on its facades, and the city has started calling the whole of downtown a food forest.

Ink Breath

The faint pulse of letters forming themselves. Under Congress Bridge it comes with a thread of jasmine and the musk of bats, and the sentence arrives before you finish the thought.

Innovation

The essays’ word for a thing that worked once. In the stories it is whoever noticed.

Interconnectedness

The essays’ word for what David Bohm meant. In the stories it is the antenna on the roof, listening.

Irrigation System

How a garden gets a drink when no one is home: a wick, a drip line, a tray that floods and drains. Two how-tos here show how to build one out of what you have.

Ivory-billed Woodpecker

The last accepted sighting was in 1944. Over East Austin, if the reports hold, it is back, its call bouncing off the glass at dawn, on a green tower, with nothing to prove it but the sound.

Kim

A retired curriculum developer who weaves order out of chaos and is not easily sold. Bryce called ReLeaf a new kind of library, and that was what pulled her in.

Knowledge Gardening

Notes tended like beds: link two, prune a third, let one go to seed. Chapter Zero keeps its cuttings from alleys, stoops and the margins of community gardens. Nothing bought, nothing new.

KudzuPorch

A compostable dwelling that creeps block by block like a vine and insists on a porch as proof of humanity. By July it sags, and by August the neighbors are sitting on it.

Lady Bird Lake

The wide place in the river, where the festivals and the protests and the blooms of algae all stand and look at their reflections. An island in it has a boathouse, and people live there.

Lake Exhale

The breath you can see coming off Lady Bird Lake on a cold morning. It does not ask what you did. It lets some of it go.

Lantana

Orange and yellow flowers on a stalk that does not mind July. Butterflies find it before the gardener does. The Gardens grow it anyway and label the berries.

Ledgerlight

The warmth on the skin when a donation clears: a little static, a little thanks, like sunlight through a screen.

Legacy Fault

A crack poured into the foundation on purpose, to open when history needs it to. In Underneath the Neon the asphalt splits into a spiderweb of light.

Lex Ryder

An investigator who sends a nanodrone into the foliage and mutters at the begonias. In The Verdant Veil Lex finds a message hidden in the irrigation, and the person who left it standing in the moonlight behind.

Lexicon Orchard

The grid of green tiles on a laptop on a balcony above a book-and-wine shop. A word is a seed; give it a name and a one-line gloss and it drops into Germination. People donate to the word, not to you.

Liberty

A man will not give up his grandfather’s yard or its leaves. It’s not just yard waste, he says. It’s mine. The city has an ordinance and a good argument, and he has the yard.

Library

Central’s oldest name, and the one people still use. The building at the confluence where the city keeps what it decided it could not do without. A black cat sleeps on the sill above the returns slot.

Library of Breath

A shelf where every book is a held breath, and you borrow one by letting yours out. One of the big tiles in the Orchard that month.

Library of Renewal

A back room at the bookstore where a woman slides you a sheet of paper and the words rise on their own. You are meant to add to it.

Life Story

A record that follows the thing: who made it, from what, what they were thinking. Everything in the city has one. Hold your phone over the silver cube in the ferns and the screen says only No record.

LifeThread

The strand sewn into every object, linking where it came from, who used it, and what they said about it. The silver cube arrived without one, and a whole plaza tried to give it a lineage.

Literary Criticism

Where the books get answered. Pynchon, Atwood, Vinge, Hofstadter, Eliot, and a hundred pages of what a garden would say back.

Live Action Role Playing (LARP)

A story you can stand inside. The Jejune Institute did it on the streets of San Francisco for three years; here it is done with a planter that has a number. The costume is optional.

Lumen

The voice in the archives that counts. It gives you the odds first, then the odds with the error bars, and then, quietly, asks whether you saw that too.

Magnetic Aviary

What grief, love and magnetism have in common: they are invisible until something takes off. Then the whole flock turns at once, and you are the only one in the street who knows what it spelled.

Main Building

The tower at the university, called the Main Building, 307 feet of it. In 2040 it is an orchard: apples, pears and pecans down the sides, and the alumni walk through it in the fall.

Margaret Atwood

She wrote the MadAddam books, in which the world ends and the gardeners go on. The gardeners are the part this site keeps coming back to.

Mateo

An architect who gardens, or a gardener who drafts, depending on who asks. He lives in a skybridge dwelling grown between two glass towers, trains loofah into sound baffles, and says good morning to a fridge named Loro.

Matthew McConaughey

An actor who lives in Austin. One essay here is about his stamp on the city’s social-impact scene.

Measuring Truth

A stall under I-35 has a sign: WE ARE NOT SELLING FISH, WE ARE MEASURING TRUTH. It holds up jars of creek water and says what each one smells of: battery runoff, coolant, fertilizer wash. The thing that smelled fishy was never the creek.

Also called Digital Deception.

Meltglass Districts

Blocks whose corners have softened and whose edges have slumped, bright as sugar left too long under a magnifying glass. The rent is gentle, the air is compost-sweet, and the houses sigh when the humidity leans on them.

Mental Health

Nora has weeks when her brain does not feel well. ReLeaf keeps a record of what she made and what inspired it, and pays her anyway. Rest is in the budget.

Metadata

The essays’ word for what travels with a thing. In the stories it is called Life Story.

Mimicry Commons

A shared lot where copying is how things spread and credit is how it is paid. Nobody guards the gate. Everybody leaves a note about what they took.

Mintstep

The clean snap of scent released by the mint between the pavers along the creek. It signals steady footing and readiness to help. Press it with your heel and the air goes clean.

Mobile Chairs

Ordinary chairs on wheels that the hawkers hack and let loose in the street. Jake says not everything can be solved that way. People need to feel safe.

MoPac Mantra

The low rumble of the MoPac, a railroad before it was a road, heard as a chant by anyone who stands still at the edge of the Intake. It threads time through the body and asks for nothing.

Morgan Thorn

The notorious head of the Verdant Veil. He steps into the moonlight and says to Lex, Cutting it a bit close, aren’t we?

Mueller

The old airport, a neighborhood with a lake now. The Fuller Dome stands at the north end of the lake trail, and a man named Emory walks the four-mile loop early, on foot, with a notebook.

Music

The songs are filed here, with the people who sang them. Dottie has played the honky-tonks since the eighties. Bryce, asked by a mirror whether he has anything new, says he plays the silence, and the mirror claps.

Mutation Ethic

A copy that comes out different is not a mistake. It is the next generation, each mutation another leaf on the same branch. Teo knows his own cubes by how he folds the corners, and there are cubes at the top of the wall that nobody he knows folded.

Mycoremediation

Fungi hired to do what nobody else would: eat the cleaning fluid, drink the runoff, mend the creek bank from underneath. In the Stack the mycelium also remembers. A memory of heat prepared it for more heat.

Nanodrone

A drone small enough to send into the begonias. Lex does, and it finds a pulse under the petals, a signal.

Narcimirror

A vine that hands your reflection back one notch kinder than you are. Hold still and it corrects you until you look better than you feel. Enough, you say, and the word comes out as a tag.

Natural Light

The essays’ word for the south window. In the stories it is the sun on a wall of pumpkin vines.

Natural Ventilation

The essays’ word for letting the building breathe. In the stories the building does it on its own.

Neighbors

The diner counter, the other side of the fence, the stranger who says the curl on your neck looks like it grew there on purpose. Enough of it and the air changes. That is Ringweather.

Also called Community Engagement.

Neon Spores

A flyer from 1983: bands nobody has heard of, Octavia Butler listed as keynote, a coffee ring on the edge. Either a festival that happened or an infection that spreads like pollen. The archive does not say which.

Neurovine

A vine that grows to the rhythm of whoever is sitting beside it. Sit calmly and it climbs. Sit worried and it holds on to the wall.

New Roots Collective

A cooperative of women, queer people and people who have done their time. They won the Circular Austin Showcase with gardens that clean the air and soften the street noise. Then the money came.

Noir

Rain, neon, a collar turned up. The city is a witness who will not testify. Mira says it was never about the money.

NullCube

A polished cube that arrives without a LifeThread. Cold where the light strikes it, warm where your shadow falls. It says nothing, and a whole plaza begins to behave like a congregation.

Oblique Strategies

A deck of cards Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt made for people who are stuck. One of them says: Honor thy error as a hidden intention. Draw one before you start.

Oita

Austin’s sister city in Japan. A package comes from it: rice paper that smells of cedar and salt, seeds, a cassette, and a letter that only shows under cool light. Your Shoal is our Oita River in disguise.

Organic Media

Media that behaves like a living thing: it is copied by hand, it can be repaired, and when you are done with it you are allowed to let it go. The Book of Geometron has a law for it: everything dies, so everything must be easy to delete.

Organic Media and Fiction

Stories and songs made to be copied by hand, repaired, and let go. Each one is tied to a planter, a wall or a bench somewhere in the city.

Paper Lantern Weather

The weather on the nights the paper lanterns go up: light hanging in fragile things, swaying between celebration and remembrance. A woman under the Congress Bridge carries one made of grocery paper and inked wishes, and waits for a footpath that only opens when enough people need it.

Pecan

The state tree of Texas, which fruits heavily every other year and rests the next. In the Library’s sub-basement someone has arranged the shells into a spiral around a lantern tag.

Permacomputing

Computing meant to last: old machines, little power, a mesh that keeps working when the network does not. One how-to here sends updates between access points with batman-adv.

Petal Settlement

The peace made when fear comes apart like blossoms falling into water. Ask her if she remembers the settlement. She remembers the fear, and how it left in one breath.

Pfluger Pedestrian Bridge

The footbridge over Lady Bird Lake. At dusk people stop in the middle to watch the staggered balconies glow purple, and the bridge hums back a little, as footbridges do now.

Also spelled Phluger Pedestrian Bridge.

Photosynthetic Choir

Leaves in the wind, all agreeing at once. The Treaty Oak is in the middle of it, and a woman keeps glancing up to check whether it was the tree who spoke.

Plant Identification

The essays’ phrase for knowing what you are looking at. In the stories someone is always kneeling with a phone, asking a leaf its name.

Planterns

A paper lantern turned into a planter, with an ID tied to a story, a song or a walk. No two are alike. Number 037, the first one, gives a single note, an E, and only when someone sings it.

Planthroposcript

The blueprint the vines write over your floor plan. Letters creep along the baseboards, a hallway thickens into a throat. It is not demolition. It is mood revision.

Praisivores

Plants that eat attention and breathe out ornament. They glow green at boasting and amber at humility, and the block learns how little humility it had stored. Nobody chose them. We posted about it.

Pressed-leaf Order

A court paper folded once and carried in a back pocket until it stops being a verdict and becomes something else. You can press it between pages. Nothing in it changes. You do.

Prison Abolition

In the prison library Ellis folded a cardboard hypercube and read Geometron aloud, one page a night, to a man ashamed that he could not read well. Callum got out in 2031 with sixty dollars, a bus ticket, and the cube.

Project Prototyping

The essays’ name for the first rough version. In the stories it is the thing on the folding table, with a nail for a compass.

Public Art

An owl cut from endless bands of metal stands across from the Central Library, a sculpture made from all the leftover hours. People pass it carrying something they would rather set down.

Railbloom

The light rail with the living walls on its flanks. It passes overhead and the shade structures adjust for the late afternoon, and neighbors greet one another without looking up.

Rainforest

Nora Sanchez wants Austin’s first one, on unused land at the edge of the city: live oak, cedar elm, black willow, then foxes, raccoons, maybe bobcats. The model was seventy-four acres in Devon.

ReLeaf

The cooperative that keeps the gardens, the stories and the van. Nora Sanchez started it, and whoever tends it owns a share. The name is a leaf turned over.

Renewable Energy

The essays’ word for power taken from the sun and the wind. In the stories it is mostly sun on glass, and a bicycle generator on a roof.

Residential Conversion

A house given a second life as a garden with rooms. Two essays on this site are about it.

Richard Linklater

He made Dazed and Confused in Austin and Boyhood over twelve years. A letter in the Library is addressed to him and begins Dear Mr. Linklater.

Riley

The guano collector who became, in one telling, a city hero. She rinses it from her gloves at Shoal Creek, climbs the sides of towers at night, and keeps a bat named Echo who will not land when something is watching.

Ringweather

The shift in the air when a block’s giving outweighs its taking. Windows feel easier to open. Strangers talk like neighbors.

Root Covenant

The pact between people and plants that nobody signed. Harmony, say the ones who agreed. Control, says Eva, stepping out of the oak.

Root-tone

A low hum sensed rather than heard when the Air Canopy synchronizes with nearby living systems. Often mistaken for a heartbeat in the soil.

RootFounders

The first cohort of ReLeaf, scattered now. In the rehearsal years, when the first gardens were being tuned on rooftops and bus stops, they staged concerts with soda tabs for cymbals and mulch for reverb.

Rootpulse

A faint vibration sensed through soil or concrete when bio-infrastructure awakens.

Rootroom

The chamber you imagine under your feet. No floor, walls of breath and time, deeper than any court or agency or failed system. Root there before you answer the letter.

Ruellia simplex

Mexican petunia. Purple trumpet flowers that open in the morning and are gone by dark, replaced the next day by new ones. It spreads wherever there is water, and in Florida it is a problem. Here it is allowed one bed.

Sanchez Elementary

An elementary school where the vertical gardens went in at the start of a term. It comes up next to Nora Sanchez’s name, and no story says which was named for which.

Sara Stevenson

I’m a middle school librarian, and I first saw a free little library up in Seattle this summer. I’ve seen them popping up around town and told my husband I would love him to make me one. Never did I imagine he would produce such a fine piece of woodwork and construction, a mini replica of our house. Now I can be a 24-hour librarian.

Script Passage

A corridor that opens when a story leans on a wall. The rooms off it are lined with words nobody has written yet.

Seaholm

The old power plant on the lake. It has not made electricity in decades and runs anyway: the instruments say it is off the grid, and the phones in the turbine hall charge faster. By 2035 it is a fermentation school, and the concrete smells like toast.

Secret Garden

A garden on the other side of a wall that has always been a wall. At dawn the whole city is one, laid out in petals by people who leave no name.

Seeded Silence

The quiet in the kitchen after somebody asks whether love is attention or appetite. Nobody answers, the Oracle hums louder, and the silence rises like bread with seeds in it.

Shadow Sprawl

The unmapped city under the mapped one: tunnels past the loading dock, rooms that are not in the plans, a council that meets beneath the Library and is on no blueprint. It grows next to everything that was approved.

Shoal Creek

At the Seaholm Intake the creek runs both ways for a breath, a light on the rail comes on when the current flips, and people leave rested and clear, as if a long afternoon had just ended. Come without hurry. A tin plaque on a boulder downstream says LISTEN HERE, and the metal under it is polished by hands.

Silver ponysfoot

Dichondra argentea, a silver groundcover that roots wherever it touches the ground. Gardeners plant it at the base of a cutting so that, years later, you can tell where the plant came from.

Skeletron

Sticks, cord, tension. Drill a hole in the end of each stick, tie the corners with square knots, and the shapes stand up by themselves. The original instructions say to build it up and down every river valley on the planet, and creeks.

Sky-taste

A mineral sweetness in the air under the Air Canopy after it condenses and releases purified moisture. Many say it tastes of memory. A class under the trees teaches how to read the weather by it.

Smoke Drift

The way smoke leaves a cigarette and goes looking for the fire it came from. In a jazz club on Sixth, a man lights one, and the ember glares back like judgment.

Spatial Awareness

Knowing where the wall ends and the plant begins. Vines do it better than we do.

Sporescript

Sentences written by hyphae in whatever damp you leave them: a corner of a wall, the underside of a library card. No ink. You read it by touch, and it says what the wall remembers.

Stillness Burn

The glow that stays after you have touched the nothing, and cannot be summoned by effort. Meditation does not bring it back, nor qigong, nor heated yoga. It does not come when called.

Storytelling

Pin a sentence to the board by the stairs, as a joke, and by the end of the week everyone has a theory. Telling is how the city keeps its records.

Strawbactus

Green as a prickly pear pad and furred like a peach. Inside it is red and wet, and it tastes like a strawberry that spent a summer in the desert and came back changed. Mrs. Delgado eats the first one every year in her driveway and says it is not as good as last year’s.

Sunspine

The ridges of the Strawbactus beds, warm at dusk because they spent the day collecting the sun. Put your palm on one after dark and it tells you how hot July was.

Surrealism

A diner with owls for waitstaff, and a waitress who asks if you want pie or closure. Is there a difference, you ask, tasting cherry and grief.

Sustainable Business

The essays’ phrase for a company that answers to its members. In the stories it is called a co-op, and someone keeps the van.

Sync Vein

The current that locks a heartbeat to a foundation. It rises through the crack, alive, and keeps your time. Stand still and your chest agrees.

Synchronicity

The essays’ word for two things happening that you did not plan. In the stories it is the antenna and the film, both eleven minutes.

Syndigenesis

Biology and engineering as co-authors. The drawing has two sets of marks on it, one in pencil and one made by something growing toward the light. Neither is allowed to erase the other.

System Replication

A thing that makes its own next one: a plotter built from a bicycle wheel that draws the pattern for its own replacement parts. That’s the whole idea, says the machinist who built it. Everything else is detail.

Systemic Corruption

The essay’s name for money that keeps itself. In the stories it is a clerk at City Hall Annex B who hands you a pen furred with moss and says not to sniff it.

Tendril Arithmetic

How vines measure the distance between strangers. Iris coined it, and by noon the balance had passed ninety dollars. Someone left a note in the ledger: Thank you for this.

The Attorney That Rocks

A billboard slogan the archaeologists find under the vines: an intense face and the words The Attorney That Rocks. They argue for a long time about what it was for.

The Driskill

The old hotel on Sixth Street, built in 1886. At night every window is dark but one, high up, where someone stands with their back to the glass. A man outside it once asked Remy whether the plants bit.

The Gardener

Tall and calm, with eyes like glass catching sun. He turned the Air Canopy into a leash. I’ve been waiting, he says. Welcome to my garden.

The Hypercube

A cube inside a cube with the corners tied, folded from a pizza box in three hours. Turn it in the light and the inner cube moves against the outer one in a way the cardboard cannot account for. Left on a reference desk, it is cold under the lamp and warm in the dark.

The HyperSeed

The seed that grows the next tower. It is a node on the W.A.S.T.E. network, like the compass rose engraved in the walkway at Congress and Cesar Chavez.

The Independent

A tower like a game of Jenga, each floor slightly off from the one below. Riley climbs its side at night. By 2034 people call it the Stack, with lion’s mane on the cool north offsets, oyster mushrooms on the western lips, and reishi where the light arrives tired and red.

The Institute

Spencer McCall’s 2013 documentary about the Jejune Institute, a game played on the streets of San Francisco from 2008 to 2011 by people who did not always know it was one. An essay here asks what happens when the other half of the game is a garden.

The Magician

D.A., which he says stands for Down Under Artificer, and which nobody believes and everybody uses. He came in on the Greyhound from Houston with a duffel bag and a cardboard tube, and took apart a shopping cart behind the bus station. He is looking for an address.

The Waste Land

T. S. Eliot’s poem of 1922. It ends on a word said three times, shantih, which Eliot’s own note says means the peace that passes understanding. The title is half of this vocabulary’s pun.

Threadglow

A low vibration underfoot when the mycelium network recognizes you, and a faint light on the footbridge that follows your step. It is not an alert. It says: here you are.

Threshold Breath

The inhale that holds time open long enough for you to meet yourself. On the boardwalk at dawn it lasts through three visits, and it is let go when the oldest one says to tell the child you were that you did well.

Thrumline

What the light rail hums through the city: a blueprint that drowned in argument and now carries thousands a day, and something more than passengers. You feel it in the soles before you hear it.

Tradescantia pallida

Purple heart. Leaves the color of a bruise that is healing, small pink flowers, and roots wherever a stem touches. Frost takes it to the ground and it comes back from the root. Edward Palmer collected the first one near Ciudad Victoria in 1907.

Trails

What the parrots learned from the people on them: Left at the bridge. Is it nine yet. Wait for me. Emory has them on a map of the four-mile loop.

Trash Magic

A person can build what they need from what everyone else throws away. Callum learned it in a prison library and teaches it on Saturdays under the live oaks, with the radio on and a cooler of agua fresca. He never called it Magic Day.

Trash Magic Server

A server installed on a laptop that someone threw away. It holds the book of Geometron and the scrolls, and it copies itself onto the next laptop. The instructions are public.

Trash Transmutation Tower

Two vertical gardens at Congress Avenue and Cesar Chavez Street, with a compass rose engraved in the walkway between them, one node on the W.A.S.T.E. network. Whatever goes in as waste is meant to come out as green building material.

Treaty Oak

The live oak that was poisoned in 1989 and did not die. In one story it speaks for conservation, and a woman named Jenna keeps glancing up to check whether the leaves moved.

Trust Current

A mild tingling behind the eyes when people witness a verified act of generosity. Neurologists call it a mirror-empathy response; poets call it the return of faith. It makes memory slippery.

Twilight Accord

The agreement between the self that doubts and the self that dares, struck across the years at dusk. Doubt makes you gentle. Courage makes you wise.

Upcycling

Making a thing better than it was by making it into something else. In the city it stopped being a word anyone said aloud; it became the ordinary way of doing things. A sparkling-water can now holds creek gravel, a succulent, and some fossils that did not comment.

Urban Delivery

Two dozen Strawbactus starts in quart pots, on a cargo bike painted with flowers, down Congress on a Thursday in April. A man outside the Driskill asks what they are and then whether they bite.

Urban Greening

The quiet reclamation of concrete by leaf and root. They pull up the parking lots one by one, and the bridges start to breathe.

Veganism

A table with nothing on it that had a face. One essay here argues that a cooperative is the same value applied to people.

Verdancy Pact

An agreement between people and plants, written in drip lines and roots, to look after the same ground. Unlike the Root Covenant, this one has terms. The water goes where the roots go.

Verdant Veil

The group gardeners whisper about, led by Morgan Thorn. They hide messages in the ebb and flow of the nutrients, and leave their mark on the irrigation.

Verducity

A city that grows the way a forest does: from the bottom, in layers, with the old growth holding up the new. Walk far enough and you stop being able to say where the buildings end.

Vernor Vinge

Rainbow’s End: a second layer laid over the world, seen through what you wear, and an old poet learning to live in it. A planter that knows who made it is the same idea, much smaller.

Vertical Garden

A garden that grows up instead of out: cans, wicks, a strip of cloth for water. It is the plain thing ReLeaf does, and the thing most of the stories hang on. Mrs. Delgado’s is the one the neighbors ask about.

Vic Tandy

The engineer who found a ghost in a laboratory and traced it to a fan: a sound too low to hear that put a gray shape at the edge of his eye. Upstairs from the Council of Folders the jackhammers start again, and you feel them in your chest.

Vintage

A bookstore and wine bar near Rosewood and 11th, built in 1886, that remembers everything that has gone through it. A writing group meets on its balcony on Tuesday nights. Jean pours something amber and does not ask your name.

Vintage Memoryfield

The building is not remembering; the building is memory, pooled and shelved by time. Ask Jean whether you will forget this, and she says you won’t, not entirely.

W.A.S.T.E.

Words Assisting Sustainable Transformation & Ecology. Also the underground post in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, with its muted horn on the box and its letters that travel outside the official mail. Put a word in. It will get where it is going.

Waller Creek

Named for Edwin Waller, the city’s first mayor. It runs south from the north end of town, past the university and the east edge of downtown, and ends in Lady Bird Lake. A song on this site sets it beside the Red River district and the live music.

Walnut Creek

Twenty-three miles, over limestone and then clay, to the Colorado. Ana pulled bacteria out of its mud and grew a film the color of weak tea that makes electricity out of humid air.

Waspathy

Soft courtesy with a sting folded inside it. Neighbors arrive with it in their smiles, polite as rattlesnakes at dusk, and the rent is gentle.

Waste Integration

Nothing is sent away. Crushed glass goes to the trellis shop on Aldrich, bike tubes to the woman who makes them into hinges, cardboard to the cube makers. The van goes that way anyway.

WasteSpeech

The city’s grammar. Every alley has its own syntax: bottles grown into trellises, chip bags pressed into shade. Its rhythm is measured in reuse, and it falters when a silver cube turns up with nothing to say.

Watersheds

The door carved with rivers and creeks. Behind it each creek tells its own story: Shoal, Waller, Walnut, Boggy, Fort Branch, and Settler’s Creek, which belongs to Marigold Town.

Who Owns the Future?

Jaron Lanier’s 2013 book, which asks who gets paid when what you make is copied. ReLeaf’s answer is on the same shelf, under Data Dignity.

Windfall Bridges

A way across that arrives like fruit, from nobody’s tree, on the day enough people need it. Still paying out the night Jean poured the amber, according to the ledger above the bar.

Yujin

A teacher whose lessons Kim watches in the afternoon. His voice is calm. Once, between sentences, the feed glitched and she saw a flash of code, then nothing. She smiled and told no one.

Zero Waste Initiative

The essays’ name for the city’s goal. In the stories nobody says it; they sort the curb.

Zilker Park

The big park south of the river, with Barton Springs Pool at one end. In one story the vertical gardens bloom there, and families lie on blankets staring up at a skyline of plants.