Recent Entries

Current Music: Naomi Westwater: the empress

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July 25, 2000

My mood improved markedly with a visit from the tall one and his son, my grandkid, little treelet.

Wakanomori brought down a diary the tall one had kept as a kid: here is the entry from July 25, 2000, which includes our visit to Lloyd Alexander's house, where we put on a play for him and his wife Janine. Also included is a visit to the US mint in Philadelphia and commentary on the Delaware River (big!)

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a handful of microfictions

Having some feelings, so ... have some microfictions.

May 20, prompt word "serve"

Directions for serving certain abstract dishes:

--revenge is a dish best served cold
--pornography is a dish best served hot
--satire is a dish best served salty
--mockery is a dish best served bitter
--disappointment is a dish best served sour
--romance is a dish best served sweet

June 26, prompt word "kind"

"May I pay you in kind rather than currency?" the woman asked. The man was selling Dastrian funerary masks, perhaps war loot from the last conflict.

"That depends. What you got to offer?" He was suspicious--she looked Dastrian.

"These magical birds."

Impressed, the man agreed.

As he neared home that evening, the birds suddenly took flight. They plunged through the windows of his house, seizing precious objects in their talons, and flew off.

Payment in kind.

July 2, prompt word "clear"

"I'm not guilty," I insisted. It was true. Sure, I'd taken the bribe and misplaced evidence, but I did NOT betray Pereira. Yet now all I got were angry looks and curses.

"My spell will clear your name," Lady One Eye said. I believed her and didn't notice when she added, "Clear it but good."

The next day, no one knew me. I introduced myself and they looked confused. I wrote out my name, but it was like they couldn't see it.

My name had been cleared into invisibility.

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birds,
questions

a trade

This question popped into my head when I looked out my window and saw a catbird balancing on a stick, using its wings to help it balance.

Would you trade your arms and hands for wings?

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Rhapsody to humid heat

Waking up this morning was like waking up in the Amazon, and I AM HERE FOR THIS. Out my back window, a northeastern jungle, so many shades of green, dappled sun, morning mist. An aural bouquet of birdsong and small critter sounds. Right now there's a scent of wood smoke.

I love the way the medium of humid air makes you intimate with every other thing. The way everything is right on your skin and in your lungs. The glass of water sweats, you sweat. Time dissolves, sound travels nonlinearly, odors are more vivid. I love the lassitude, the exhaustion.

Current Music: A Change Is Gonna Come, covered by John Boutté Jambalaya, boutteworks

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a wonderful day

Today was wonderful!

It started out with meeting a young woman in a wheelchair, birdwatching by a small pond with cattails.

"I think I saw an American bittern," she said.

Later I brought some catalpa blossoms to a friend, and they gave me an iced, homemade-banana-syrup-and-oat-milk latte to take with me on my errands. It was a hot day and the drink was perfect!

My errands included buying a sickle to cut this long grass.

Not now: now I want to let it alone, as the fireflies and butterflies and bees enjoy it (and also I enjoy it). But later, in the fall, when the time comes to cut it. A lawn mower does a horrible, chewy job, and the shears I have are blunt.** So I want to try a sickle. I saw people cutting grass with sickles in Timor-Leste. Here is my sickle. I've named her Kusakari (grass cutter).

Now, as it happens, I also have a lump hammer, which the healing angel named Petra, and which is great for smashing open hickory nuts or acorns. Here she is, posing with some of last year's hickory nuts.

Well ... if we introduce.... Petra to Kusakari.... OMG!

Then on the way home from my errands, I was driving along a stretch of road that's marked "Turtle Crossing." Usually this is a depressing stretch of road because in spite of the sign, what I mainly see are crushed turtles -_-

But today I saw a live one, craning its neck, preparing to risk its life to get across the road. So I pulled over, went back, picked it up, and carried it across. When I set it down, it trundled on down to the water that was waiting for it.

ONE TURTLE LIFE SAVED. Yaaay!

And now I'm going to eat strawberries and whipped cream. PERFECT DAY.

**Yes, I could sharpen them. In fact I have sharpened them in the past and probably will in the future... but ... sickle!

ETA: The sickle's name should be KusaKARI, not KusaKIRI--corrected that now.

Current Music: Biomigrant & El Monte Adentro: Voz emplumada del monte

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Dónde tienen su hogar las aves migratorias?

Where do migratory birds have their home?

Below are just three screenshots from a series of 16 photos on the Instagram account of somadifusa (Laura Ortiz), of murals she and the tattoo artist Azul Luna (Instagram account azulunailustra) painted in Bogota, Colombia.

I'm captivated by these images both of traveling swallows, some bearing backpacks and baskets, some with shells on their back like hermit crabs, and of hearts that are also nests, or that morph into shells, or sprout flowers and eyes. "Home is where the heart is," or the heart makes the home.

They write [my clunky translation--see the link at the end to see their original]

I have seen swallows nest in dark passageways, in airports, beneath bridges, in the palm of a hand and in the center of a star. Their wings cover kilometers, crossing the scars of the earth, their free flight reminding us that to migrate is not a crime and that borders are imaginary.

They conclude their post with a Spanish translation of a poem they believe is by Emily Dickinson, but there's absolutely no sign of it in English, and no sign of it in Spanish, either, except their post. Very strange... Please let them not have been taken in by an AI hallucination... please let there be some other explanation

Original post on Instagram

Current Location: Manu Chau: Mr. Bobby (Playing for Change version)

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Wednesday reading: Belle-Medusa, by Manuela Draeger*

It's a cold, surreal post-apocalyptic world, plagued by meteor showers, crumbling apartments patrolled by tigers, one where former tar-spreading technicians repurpose themselves as morning soup sellers. Bobby is wakened by a knocking at his door. He doesn't open it, but he's told, through the closed door, that Belle-Medusa, an immensely huge jellyfish, needs his help. Belle-Medusa has a library of scents in her memory, but they're mainly ocean scents. She wants Bobby to collect and convey land scents to her:

In truth, she only had one passion anymore: she collected smells. Aromas, perfumes, whiffs, and scents of all types. She numbered them and she put them in tiny special cases in her memory, in a classification system that nobody, apart from herself, was able to understand.

For this purpose, Belle-Medusa has already "plugged into" Bobby. There are various ways he can convey the scents to her, but the way he settles on is to plunge his face into water and speak them.

I had my cheek pressed against the windowpane. Just under my nose, fed by the steam that escaped from my mouth, the frost drew branching ice wisps, which imprisoned the dust. If I had had to specify the smell that lingered on the surface of the glass, I would have spoken of a dusty ice floe, of frozen goose down, of dark sherbet. Wait, I thought, maybe I could send that to Belle-Medusa, in order to check that the communication between us is well established.

I left my observation post. I groped my way to the bathroom and I filled the sink with what flowed from the faucet, water that carried with it cubes and needles of ice. Before immersing my face, I had to stir it with my hand so as not to use the end of my nose to break the film threatening to form ... I sank my head into it to my ears.

"It's me, Belle-Medusa," I said.

( Heh, this got long. Let's put in a cut. )

It's a strange and wonderful story, and I recommend it. I read it in an anthology called XO Orpheus: Fifty New Myths, edited by Kate Bernheimer and published in 2013. The anthology was lent to me by a friend who had picked out that story especially for me to read because (I'm flattered to say), they said it reminded me of the story of mine they'd read--and also, I suspect, because the story's important to them: it's entered their vocabulary. They talk about their scent library. The other stories in the collection look promising too; while I'm borrowing the book, I think I'll read some more.

It also exists as a 64-page standalone publication, but only in its original French, as Belle-Méduse. For the anthology, the translation was done by Sarah and Brian Evenson.

*Manuela Draeger is a fictitious author, a librarian whose stories are intended as distraction for children in containment camps. The author of her world is Antoine Volodine ... which is in turn a pen name of the writer Jean Desvignes.

Current Music: Melos Han-Tani: Give Thanks to Punctuation

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the rambling rose and all her beguiling promises

This is the season when Rosa multiflora, the indomitable conqueror of roadsides and wastelands, the one who can render a pleasant meadow into an impassable, laceration-producing wall of arching, spreading, canes, puts out its flowers. Everywhere there are curtains and drifts of small, white-and-yellow blossoms, with a fragrance so intense that you breathe it in and begin to float. The whole rest of the year it's thorns and You Shall Not Pass, but right now it's Come To Me And Stay Awhile My Love.

"It's worth a little blood, isn't it? You can cede a little ground, can't you? To enjoy this moment with me now?" says the rambling rose.

Current Music: Cheikh Ibra Fam: Diom Gnakou Fi (feat. Mo' Kalamity)

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driveway art: song sparrow

We have some sunny days, and I finished the job I was working on, so I drew a song sparrow. The song sparrow is found throughout most of North America, "continuous from the Aleutians to the eastern United States," says Cornell Ornithology. They're small everywhere bird with a lovely song. Both their song and their plumage varies across the continent.

Scientific name "Melospiza melodia." You can hear samples of their songs here. (The ones around here sound most like the fourth recording down.)

Current Music: Sona Jobarteh: Gambia

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read the comments

It's a general truth of online life that you shouldn't read the comments--it's where the virulent nastiness lives.

Every now and then, that's not true though. After falling in love with the song "Xam Xam," by Cheikh Ibra Fam, I let Youtube take me on a tour of related songs.

It brought me "Gambia," by Sona Jobarteh, a beautiful song written to celebrate 50 years of Gambian independence (in 2015).

I happened to glance at the comments, and--my heart!

I'm a German, 55 years and my husband was a Gambian. He died here in Germany in 2011 (cancer). Today he would have celebrated his 62nd birthday. In 1998 he took me to his country and we spent there two years. This was the most beautiful time in my life. For the first time in my life, I felt like real living – I felt alive like never before. So I want to say "thank you" to my husband again, who showed me a place where my soul could breath. Whenever I feel down, doubting what this life is all about, I go back in my mind and think of those glory days.

And this...

Oh, i can recognise my grandmother at the end of this clip dancing with a group of women's. Thank you sister sona for futuring my granny. This will go down in history. Gambia for ever true.

And this...

I am from Ukraine and this music made me cry. It touches something deep in my heart. I think we missed Africa and we miss it. I play it and dance in the kitchen. I would like the whole world to go out in the streets and dance African dances. As not only live in our brains, but also in our bodies and our hearts.

And this..

From Somalia 🇸🇴 much love ❤️ our brothers & sisters 🇬🇲 beautiful country & beautiful people ❤️

And on and on...

"Am from Uganda ... I am from the Caribbean ... I'm a dutch old (63) man ... I'm latina from Colombia ... Je suis de la Côte d'Ivoire 🇨🇮 ... I'm Argentinian ... I'm a Proud ERITREAN-AFRICAN ... I am from India ... I'm a japanese student ... I'm from Morocco ... I am welsh ... I am from Spain ... I am white African from Mozambique ... I'm Nigerian ... I am peruvian ... I am from Croatia ... I am from Bangladesh .... I am Congolese... Sending love from Ghana ... Greetings and best wishes from Latvia..."

(And several from the United States, too.)

All full of love for the song. Really made me feel like part of one human family.

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acorns,
cooking

addendum: acorn-meal crepes!

Also tasty ;-)

Current Music: Max Pizzolante: La gente quiere calle

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acorn bread and açaí

acorn bread

The leftover acorn meal I had in my fridge had gone moldy! Ah well. Fortunately I had acorns left over from last time, so I ground those up, leached them, dried them, and yesterday made a loaf of ... well it's mainly white bread--three cups white flour--but also a cup of acorn meal. So I am going to call it acorn bread, the same way you call a thing banana bread even though it's not mainly bananas.

Behold its majesty!

I still have leftover meal from this batch of acorns, but I will not make the same mistake twice by letting it linger. I intend to make acorn pancakes, or perhaps I'll use it to make some kind of meatballs or fish cakes.

Açaí

Or asaí, as they spell in in Colombia. We in America use the Brazilian (i.e., Portuguese) spelling. In Tikuna it's waira.

Açaí juice (wairachiim) is so beloved in the Amazon. And with reason--it's GREAT. Drink it sweetened, and with fariña, and it's a real pick-me-up:

The Açaí palms are very tall and very skinny. Traditionally, harvesting the berries involves a not-very-heavy person shimmying up the palm with a knife and cutting off the bunches of berries, as in the YouTube short below. (I say traditionally because in some parts of Brazil I think there are now large plantations, and they may have a mechanized way of doing this. But still--I gather--many many people do it the unmechanized way.)

The video specifies Brazil, but it'll be true anywhere that açai grows

My tutor's dad does this. Here's a picture not of her dad but of her boyfriend with a bunch of berries--gives a sense of how big they are:

And the process of making the juice is really labor intensive too. Here's my tutor's mom pounding it. You add water as you go along:

This year the river has really risen high, and in talking about it, my tutor said her dad had been able to go out in canoe and collect the asaí really easily. And I was thinking... wait... you mean the river's risen so high that he's up near the top of the trees? Is that what she's telling me?

I wasn't sure, so I did this picture in MS word (b/c I have no digital drawing tools) and sent it to her and asked, You mean like this?

And she said, "Yes, exactly."

Mind = blown.

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two women

The first woman

At an intersection in my father's town, there was a woman with multiple signs. She cycled through them, holding them up. One said something along the lines of don't-throw-away-the-constitition, another said something like no-grift-jets. There was another relating somehow to 9-11. Her clothing made me think of a bee or a hornet: she had on a black T-shirt, a yellow jacket tied around her waist, a yellow baseball cap, tawny shouder-length hair, pale-ish freckled skin.

"You have a lot of signs there," I said.

"Oh, these are nothing. I have like twenty at home."

"Do you come here every weekend?"

"Every Tuesday. And sometimes on the weekends. And yes, I have a job! Sometimes people shout that at me, 'Get a job.' I'm a physical therapist. And a swimmer. After I finish here, I'm going to swim a mile."

"Wow," I said. "I couldn't swim a mile" (vast understatement).

"Yep. I'm going to be in a competition in a few weeks. A two-mile swim. I've got stamina and endurance. I'm perfect for this." She indicated herself, the signs.

The second woman

The second one was more like a flower. She had a magenta T-shirt and bright violet-purple hair cropped close to her head, and dark brown skin. She was with a boy with undyed hair. I saw them walking up one side of a street when I was walking down the other side, and then I saw them again when we were both going the opposite way, and a third time when I was in my car and they were waiting for a bus.

If we'd been walking on the same side of the street, and if it seemed like she wouldn't mind a random remark from a stranger, and if I had a surfeit of temerity, I would have told her how much I loved her hair. But we weren't. So I just enjoyed her hair and T-shirt silently.

Current Music: Dirk Powell and the Transatlantic Musicians: Waterbound

El río creciendo

A tale of two rivers. Here's high waters on the Amazon....

And here's high waters on the Connecticut. This road (Aqua Vitae Road! Great name!) floods easily:

The speed limit sign enjoins you to drive your water-worthy car no faster than 25 mph:

The high waters create our very own "selva inundada"

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only connect

Holy moly, a person from the Tukano Amazonian people just friended me on Bluesky, and she's learning Tikuna too! I was able to say to her that I thought Tikuna was tagarü mecuraum (a beautiful language). I apologized for my poor orthography (Tikuna is rendered into letters differently in Peru, Colombia, and Brazil, but what I write is not even correct by the Colombian orthography because my teacher is pretty random about spelling). This woman then kindly gave me the correct (for Brazil) orthography, plus a grammar correction: Tága rü nã mecüraū (I left out the ña... not entirely sure what it does/means, but learning is a slow and wondrous thing).

Truly, the internet remains a wondrous place for connecting with people! And now I know the Tukano word for cassava: kií. (Tikuna is a language isolate, so the chances of my Tikuna helping me know Tukano are slight, except for common loan words they both might have from, e.g., Tupi.)

I have other things to post about but I'm going to put the different flavors on different plates (i.e., save it for another post)

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bug city

Yesterday morning I saw a construction across the asphalt path that runs through the common area in our neighborhood. It was a long stick, and leaning on the stick were smaller sticks and twigs, bits of lichen-covered bark, and moss. It looked as if ambitious small-scale beavers had decided the path was a flow of water and were attempting to dam it.

Later in the day I was passing by again, and three little kids, two boys and a girl, were happily at work on it. It was, they told me, a bug city, complete with bridges, roads, parks, districts--everything.

This morning Wakanomori and I found it expanded, so I took a video:

Watch on YouTube

They were all so wholly engaged with the work, excited and happy, feeding off each other's ideas.

What White Horses, Nazca lines, pyramids, citadels, or hanging gardens did you get up to creating in childhood? Or now, for that matter?

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being drawn to an author by an interview

Due to household habits regarding the radio, I end up hearing a LOT of radio and a lot of author interviews. Some of these people are funny, charming, surprising; others are self-important grandstanders, others make you wince with vicarious embarrassment, on and on.

The other night I heard an interview with Chloe Dalton, the author of Raising Hare, about her experiences during covid raising a newborn hare. She was a happy urbanite, contented in her life, not the sort of person who does animal rehabilitation, but she had animal rehabilitation thrust upon her, and it transformed her. Eventually she decided to write up her experiences, but for a long time she had no intention of doing so.

( musings )

I've never understood why I have such a hard time reading books about people's experiences of the natural world and their relationship to it when it's such an important part of my own life and when I'm interested in what other people have to say. What I realized, listening to the interview, was that I like *conversation* for this topic. Direct, spontaneous talk. So I don't know if Chloe Dalton's actual book can duplicate the experience I had listening to her talk. (Here's the interview, by the way. It's almost 30 minutes long.)

Maybe I'd like it? I will put it on my to-read list so that I don't lose track of it, but mainly I'm just glad to have heard the interview.

What about you? Everyone who follows me here loves books, but are there some topics that you can't go to books for? (Topics you like, I mean.)

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The movie Flow

Maybe you've seen the trailer for this wordless animated film about a black cat in a post-human world. (If not, here's a link.) The visuals were so evocative and beautiful--and the cat so like my own cat--that I was very excited to see it.

Yesterday I did see it, and it was indeed beautiful to look at ...

( but... )

Current Music: Grupo Socavon de TImibique: Quitate de me escalera

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handle with care

I arrived at the post office today as a postal worker was bringing a wide, low rectangular box out to a car. The box had holes, and I could hear peeping. As we both walked into the building, I asked, "Were those chicks?" And indeed they were.

The post office was very quiet at that time of day--except for cheeping and peeping! From the back room.

"I know I can't go back there," I said, "But can you take my phone back and take pictures?"

Well, he did better than that. He brought out a box of ducklings...

ducklings stick their head out of a cardboard carrying container

ducklings stick their head out of a cardboard carrying container

and then came a box of chicks!

baby chicks packed for shipping in a cardboard carrying container

"I guess these are all spoken for," I said wistfully.

"No, they're mainly going to tractor supply stores," he said.

But even though B'town is a right-to-farm community, I live in a neighborhood with a homeowner's association, and sadly, poultry is not allowed. We talked about backyard chickens, the price of eggs and the cost of feed, and homeowners associations.

I love my post office and the USPS generally. [That is your veiled political commentary for the day]

Current Music: lagartijeando: Isla del sol

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An Art of Noticing

Over on Mastodon I was made aware of the existence of this beautiful little zine, done in the traditional way (all printed on a single sheet of paper), Meditations with Insects: An Art of Noticing, so I decided to order it.

It came in a brown envelope with drawings of a beetle, small bird, and owl on it, and the sender was "Unfolding Connections."

cover of "Meditation with Insects: An Art of Noticing

It was everything I hoped for and more. The main text directs readers to quiet, curious attention to creatures often ignored or disliked:

drawing of an ant and a moth, with text

And then, wonder of wonders, there's text on the reverse side, too: quotes about recognizing and appreciating the presence and wisdom of other beings--unfolding connections to make ;-)

a quote from Dingo Makes Us Human by Deborah Bird Rose

a quote from Dingo Makes Us Human by Deborah Bird Rose

That quote has a typo, but it's the one that got me choked up reading it aloud to Wakanomori.

I really loved this one, too:

"the world is full of persons
only some of them human
and life is always lived in
relationship with others"

--Graham Harvey, Animism: Respecting the Living World

The creator, Kristian Brevik, has a Patreon, and he also makes lanterns of sea creatures that when lit up show the creatures' skeletons. Seems like a very cool guy.

And here's a photo from a week or so ago of some bright yellow coltsfoot pushing up through the leaf litter.

yellow coltsfoot (look something like dandelions) poking up from brown leaves.

yellow coltsfoot (look something like dandelions) poking up from brown leaves.

... I offer these as necessary nourishment in the harrowing landscape we're navigating right now.