an old photo

Yesterday I found this photo of the ninja girl's kindergarten class at the Martin Luther King, Jr., elementary school. Here she was in a minority, racially, but she didn't ever remark on it. The teacher wrote the names of all the students on the back of the picture, and as I read them, memories bloomed. I remembered the ninja girl mentioning some of them, though she herself has no recollection.



She went from this class to a rural school in England, where she was an anomaly because she was from America--and then came back to a somewhat rural school in the United States, where she was regarded as English, initially, having picked up the accent, and was also an anomaly because of having lived so many places (I've posted pictures before of her at in daycare in Japan).

But for all that I characterize this town as insular, it's not entirely so. Some families have lived here for generations, but others are recent immigrants from Russia or Poland. The nearby cities have a large Hispanic population, and some families have moved here. The next town over has a sizable Cambodian population, and there are Cambodian families here. One of Little Springtime's classmates was from Somalia. And so on. Poke around, and I think lots of places reveal more variation than meets the immediate eye.

Still, there's a definite difference between the kindergarten classes in this town and the one the ninja girl attended.

fishing in the sky ocean, fast and fugitive

This is the season for tiny green inchworms to be suspended from nearly invisible strands, which they're climbing either up or down. Someone in the sky ocean is fishing.

fishing (photo by Chris Kendig)


I suppose the fisher might catch some worm-eating birds? Robins, maybe, or starlings. Or maybe a bluebird. They generally eat insects and berries, but they "have also been observed capturing and eating larger prey items such as shrews, salamanders, snakes, lizards and tree frogs," says the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. I'm sure a floating inchworm is not beyond the skills of such a potentially fearsome hunter. And yet if it takes this inchworm . . .

Then again, maybe sometimes you can catch people this way.

(photo from Lovebryan.com)


* * *

Isn't it funny that a fugitive dye--a dye that runs away--isn't fast, and in fact a dye that sticks around is what we call fast. You'd think a fugitive, fleeing, would like to be fast. Different senses of fast though: the permanent dye is steadfast.



fleeing, but not fast