Today is also the start of Pen Pal

[asakiyume]

In addition to being catalpa day, today is also the day Pen Pal starts. On this day, Em and her friend Small Bill row out into the Gulf of Mexico, and Em throws her message in a bottle into the water.

Here's a (very amateur) picture to commemorate that.



In the next few months, I'll post pictures and things that go along with the letters and diary entries of Pen Pal--but without spoilers. I'm hoping to do a book giveaway on Goodreads, month by month, too, but I'm waiting for word from them, because I want to do it a little differently from the standard way.




ETA: And how nice: a message-in-a-bottle story came my way today, from the icebergs between Nunavut and Greenland to the shores of Ireland:

Article: Emily Chan, "Message in a Bottle: Letter Dropped in Arctic Ocean Found in Ireland"

Comments

Re: Em,

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

--If Em had gotten your message, maybe this is what she would have written back--

Dear Cinda,

Thank you for writing back! I am excited my message made it all the way to where you are.

About those bird feathers, my little sister wants to know what kind of bird the feathers are from. Do you think another bird killed it? Here I would guess a Cooper's hawk.

I think I know what you mean by beautiful and scary and sad all at once. Once when I was little my dad took me and my brother fishing with him, just line fishing, and he landed a yellowfin tuna. It was so big, and it thrashed around, and its fins looked like sickles for cutting marsh grass, and I thought maybe it might cut off my dad's hands or my brother's legs if they got too close. And then pretty soon he was just laying there limp and dead, and I felt like a great hero was gone from the sea. I don't normally mourn much for fish, but that time I did.

Do you want to trade feathers? I'll send you one from here and you could send me one from there.

Love Em

Re: Em,

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Razor fins, tails, jelly, stings, and whips--oh yes. (Asakiyume here, appreciating this catalogue of the gifts of the prodigies of the prodigious sea.)

Cinda_cite, I saw a moose the other day! My first ever! In the woods in my neighborhood. So big. My friend saw it first; she thought it was a horse at first. But then the ears! And the hump. It was a moose.