What Remains Here

Chapter 4

"Under the farming, we could start expanding the greenhouse," I said. "I don't think permanently growing plants in our living room is going to be able to last forever, so we might have to expand outdoors."

"That's a good idea," Mom replied before writing it down. "But we're going to have to find some way to keep it warm and lit up, especially at night, on top of building the structure. It's brighter outside compared to indoors, so we might not have to worry as much about light, but heat is a big problem."

"Wow, Mom," May said. "Way to shoot Neal's idea down."

"I'm not shooting it down. I wrote it on the board," Mom said. "I'm saying that we need to find all the problems so that our plans will completely work. Thinking about the solar panel trip now, I realized that there were a million ways that things could've gone wrong, and I don't want to miss any spot when we're constructing the new greenhouse."

"For heat, we could use the extra power from the panels to run heaters," Mira said. "But I don't think that we'd be able to run them at night, so I was thinking that if we could get our hands on metal barrels and put some steel wool on top of them, we could build mini fireplaces in the greenhouse–"

"The smoke might be the issue," Dad said. "Even with the steel wool, we'd still have to worry about the carbon monoxide and the smaller particles. It's too dangerous. I want it to be possible, but I don't think it's happening, especially since we'd need to, at the very least, triple our wood gathering trips."

"That's true," Mom replied. "But we'll make it happen somehow. Between all of us here, we've got two lifetimes of gardening experience, two college degrees, one and two soon-to-be college degree and high school diplomas."

"Cover plants," Grandma said, chiming in from the back, motioning with her hands, and said the rest in Taiwanese, so no one else except Mom and Grandpa understood. Mom nodded and said to the rest of us, "It's a good idea to keep the plants insulated, especially at night, and she suggested that we use plastic wrap and empty jars to cover the plants up."

"But like, isn't it completely useless to keep things warm, if nothing's warm," May said. "Like, it'll just keep things cold, so we're literally going back to our heater problem."

We threw out a bunch of solutions for our heating problem. May suggested just going and getting more solar panels, but Dad told her that the journey was far too lengthy to attempt anytime soon, though he didn't mention our run-in with the looters, keeping the ruse of safety up. Mom wanted to pipe in heat from the fireplace, but that was a non-starter and still had the issue of smoke. Mira suggested once again to use mirrors, creating a sort of solar oven, but the big question would be how we'd disperse the heat. I guess it was at that moment, I realized a way to combine Mom and Mira's ideas, using a bit of knowledge from my chemistry class.

"What if we don't need to use a heater to keep the greenhouse warm," I said. "I remembered learning in chemistry that farmers spray water on fruit during winter because the water releases heat as it cools down. We could boil water at the fireplace and then place them in the greenhouse to release heat instead of piping the heat. And we could use mirrors to heat up more water to keep the greenhouse warm at night."

"What if we make the water black," May said. "I remember how our car seats always got so hot during summer, so that could also happen to the water."

"We could also paint the jugs black," Mira said. "And we could take some aluminum foil and line the wall with it to reflect more light back in, like the greenbox right now."

"Also, composting," I said. "I don't think we can compost our, you know, fecal matter, but I know that when we compost, it can get pretty warm."

May interjected, "But when you did your composting experiment, it was so stinky–"