World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments

Of Nezhukumatathil’s many childhood moves, her most difficult is from Gowanda, New York, to suburban Ohio after her sophomore year of high school. She promises to stay in touch with her best friends, Americ and Sara, but loses touch soon after moving. Many years later, she returns to Western New York for a position at a university. While teaching there, she marries her husband and gives birth to her children. She likes New York, but it isn’t her “forever home”—she grows tired of the lack of racial diversity in the area and at her work and of the long, cold winters. She eventually moves to Oxford, Mississippi, where she currently lives.

Nezhukumatathil compares her “homing instinct” to that of the red-spotted newt. The newt’s dark red spots warn potential predators that they are poisonous. These newts spend years wandering but eventually “find their way home by aligning with the earth’s electromagnetic field” (140), returning to ponds they were born in.

The Southern cassowary is a large bird nicknamed “the living dinosaur” due to its prehistoric skeletal features and the “dark growth of keratin on the top of the cassowary’s head” (146). They have a unique symbiotic relationship with the fruit trees that make up most of their diet: “[S]eeds from the ryparosa, a highly prized Australian tree, are more likely to sprout after a ride through the cassowary’s digestive tract” (147).