Asakiyume mita

The mail brought a welcome item--my uncorrected proof for LAGOONFIRE!



I must go through it carefully and root out typos! The Polity approves of rooting out errors.

Last book featured a deity who wasn't ready to be retired. This one features a bunch of retired gods. How do they spend their time? How does the Polity treat them? You can learn a lot about a government by how it treats its decommissioned deities.

I've been spending too much time just working, but when I'm not, I step outside to enjoy the cosmos ... by which I mean the flower called cosmos, but hey, it's part of the bigger cosmos, so both things, actually.



Seems like each blossom held its own bee:


By the time I got those photos, late-ish today, the bees all seemed to be sleeping, but this morning they were active, flying blossom to blossom, but always politely socially distancing when they saw a blossom was already occupied.

It's past 5 pm, local time. Have an autumn brew.

Out my kitchen window (... if not elsewhere in the world), the day is made of soft and shining.





What adjectives is your now made of?

Here is a road I walk every day. This photo is from yesterday, but this morning, when I passed this way, an oriole flew into an apple tree (not visible in this picture) and seemed to be sniffing the blossoms. Maybe it was sipping nectar. Maybe it was nibbling the petals. Maybe it was listening to whispered secrets--I don't know.



These are not the apple blossoms that the oriole was getting intimate with, but these are apple blossoms I especially love, because they're on a tree I grew from a seed.



Beautiful May ♥

You know personal ceremonies or festivals, things you end up celebrating, year after year, just as an individual (or maybe, say, as a group of friends, or a family)--in other words, something that's not a broader cultural thing?

One of mine is the blossoming of the catalpa. SUCH A GLORIOUS TREE, with blossoms that look like they belong in tropical garlands (well, they are a bit pale, but so **fancy**), that rain down onto the street.

Here is the tree--can you see it is twice as tall as the rooming house it towers over?



And here are the blossoms, fallen on the street and grass



The blossoms wear different colors of makeup to attract the bees. Some like a red-purple, like the one over on the lower left:



Some go for golden-orange highlights:



And every year, I string them on long strands of grass and hang them up somewhere in the house.



Happy catalpas, everyone!

Sometimes people aren’t led to fairyland by ghost-pale lights or bewitching smiles . Sometimes it simply swallows them up, gulps them down. They fall into it without realizing. They’re lost and don’t even know it.

Like Maddie, walking home from the train station after a long day at work. She stops to admire a crabapple in full bloom, ghostly in the black-and-white of nighttime, luminous—from the starlight? Like the petals are cups filled up with it.

Her head becomes completely filled with petals and starlight, and then at some point she blinks and starts and thinks, Did I just doze off ?

And,

Where am I, again?

There’s a lake up ahead, filled with water lilies. Some are breaking free from their stems and rising off the lake, spinning lazily into the air.

Is she maybe dreaming? Did I maybe leave out the part where she got home, collapsed on the couch without brushing her teeth, and fell asleep?

Maybe I’m the one that’s dreaming, or maybe you are.

It gets worse. Who am I, again? she’s thinking. She knits her brow, trying to pull together some thoughts, trying to make some sense of things, but the only thought that comes to her is something about bells—is it that the lilies can be rung, like bells, if you catch one?

Maddie has that nagging feeling that she needs to remember something. It’s important, so she strains to, shuts her eyes squint-closed and presses her lips together hard, but it’s no good.

When she opens her eyes, someone with black and white fur on their cheeks standing in front of her, someone with a red tattoo in the shape of a star between their eyes.

“Lanterns, or bells?” this person asks, holding out both hands, and in both hands are lilies, tugging to be free from this person’s grasp. Those on the right are glowing slightly; those on the left chime, subsonically, when they brush against each other.

“Bells,” says Maddie, and the person smiles and hands her a lily, and she smiles and takes it.