Wednesday reading two weeks running!

[asakiyume]

I finished Rebecca Fraimow's Lady Eve's Last Con, which was rollicking good fun from cover to cover. A couple more quotes (nonspoilery) from further on in the story:

"I’d given her plenty of time to put me back in my place; she’d be faster on the draw next time around. It’s a bad habit to let yourself get caught tongue-tied. Life’s too short for should-have-saids." (51% in)

"I stuck my chin up, and tried to look like a person who was trying to look brave." (91% in)

I got one hilarious surprise, which was that one firm prediction I'd had since the very beginning ... didn't come true. All along I'd been congratulating Rebecca on treading a very difficult line to just about allow it to be possible--and then it didn't happen. I was so sure of my prediction that I had a hard time believing the evidence on the page, and then when I'd absorbed the fact, it threw what I'd seen as delicate treading into a whole other light (of the "No, actually it's quite simple: the obvious judgment is the correct one" variety). The way the story played out in reality makes for more satisfying storytelling, I think, and allows for more nuance and growth for one character, so I was pleased with it. It just took a moment of mental rearranging for me to get there (and I was retroactively a little ashamed of my prediction).

My morning morsel of Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass brought a reflection on strawberries:

In a way, I was raised by strawberries, fields of them. Not to exclude the maples, hemlocks, white pines, goldenrod, asters, violets, and mosses of upstate New York, but it was the wild strawberries, beneath dewy leaves on an almost-summer morning, who gave me my sense of the world, my place in it.

I grew up in upstate New York too. For me it was the black raspberries of early July. Being with them was my everything.

Robin Wall Kimmerer went on to talk about how the nature of a thing can change depending on how it comes to us:

It's funny how the nature of an object--let's say a strawberry or a pair of socks--is so changed by the way it has come into your hands, as a gift or as a commodity. The pair of wool socks that I buy at the store ... I might feel grateful for the sheep that made the wool and the worker who ran the knitting machine ... But I have no inherent obligation to those socks as a commodity, as private property ... But what if those very same socks ... were knitted by my grandmother and given to me as a gift? That changes everything. A gift creates ongoing relationship. I will write a thank-you note. I will take good care of them and if I am a very gracious grandchild I'll wear them when she visits even if I don't like them. When it's her birthday, I will surely make her a gift in return ... Wild strawberries fit the definition of gift, but grocery store berries do not.

Continuing to work my way through Why Didn't You Just Leave, edited by Julia Rios and Nadia Bulkin. As usual with an anthology, some stories strike my fancy more than others.

Comments

[amaebi]

That sounds like an interesting story. And those passages of Braiding Sweetgrass resonate for me as well. (Blackberries, huge hillocks of the bushes, a-buzz with insects. I loved black raspberries too, but those were rare, and like my secrets.)

[asakiyume]

Blackberries are most wondrous too!

[sartorias]

Skipping this post because I've got the book in my TBR pile!

[asakiyume]

I assume you mean the first one--and I think you'll have a lot of fun with it.

[cmcmck]

It's the wild woodland blackberries that do it for me! Just about fully ripe now!

[asakiyume]

Delicious--a summer feast!

[osprey_archer]

Sunny hillsides of blueberries... only they didn't grow near where I lived; picking blueberries was a vacation treat, tiny wild blueberries just the right size for tiny hands.

I love that reflection on the way that an object is acquired changes the nature of it, too. In recent years I've started keeping a list of things that I need (not desperately - if the need is urgent, I'll get it myself) to request as birthday/Christmas presents, so that my umbrella or my cute ankle socks aren't just a purchase but a story and a snippet of a friendship.

[asakiyume]

so that my umbrella or my cute ankle socks aren't just a purchase but a story and a snippet of a friendship. --that's beautiful ^_^

[gingicat]

I love this image.

[asakiyume]

The field of wild strawberries?

[gingicat]

Both quotes, and your mention of blackberries.

[asakiyume]

Sending you very pleased thumbs up ^_^

[squirrelitude]

elusiveat is reading Braiding Sweetgrass to me. What a lovely book, and so much to think about.

[asakiyume]

Agreed! And reading aloud together: what a treat.