Asakiyume mita

While cleaning out the shed this past weekend, I found a number of things that are no longer useful to our household. A lawn spreader, for instance. I used it once, to spread lime. Then I decided to leave the lawn to its own devices, and now I have thyme and clover and hawkweed and dandelion and plantain growing--along with various sorts of grasses--and contentedly watch the bees and butterflies all summer long.

Also two skateboards, a snowboard, a soccer ball, and a street hockey stick and puck. "We never used it for street hockey," the ninja girl reminisced, later. "It was always a weapon or a staff or something like that in the games we played."

I put these out on my front lawn with a sign saying "Mysterious items found in shed; help yourself" and went into the house to post them in the neighborhood facebook group. By the time I had done that and come back outside, the lawn spreader was already gone. Brilliant!

Some time later, in the evening, I came onto my porch to shuck some corn, heard voices out front, and lo and behold, there were four children out front, three girls--sisters--and a boy. The older two girls, maybe 11 and 9 years old, were each cradling a skateboard. The boy had the street hockey stick and puck. The youngest girl, maybe 6 or 7, was standing dejectedly in front of the snowboard and soccer ball.

"Oh hi!" said the oldest sister, when she saw me. "We can really take this stuff?"

"Yes, definitely," I said. "I appreciate it!"

"She's unhappy," said the middle sister, indicating the youngest one. "Because she wanted the street hockey stick, but Noah took it."

"I love street hockey!" said Noah fervently.

"Do you have another one in your shed?" asked the middle sister.

"I'm afraid not--that's all the stuff I have," I said. "I don't suppose she'd like a soccer ball? I guess probably everyone has a soccer ball, huh."

"Well. Not everyone," said the oldest sister.

"What if you share it?" said Middle to Youngest. And then, to Noah, "Next time you come, you could trade off with her." From which I gleaned that Noah is visiting.

Somehow they sorted things out to Noah and Youngest's satisfaction.

"Please take the soccer ball too!" I begged. "All this stuff was my kids'.** I'm not going to be playing soccer."

"What grade are your kids in?" asked Middle.

"Oh, they're all grown up." I said. Oldest and Middle nodded. Of course, of course. That explained everything!

Youngest generously deigned to take the soccer ball, which left only the snowboard. You can't really expect to move a snowboard in August! Today I took it to the take-and-leave hut at the town transfer station.


**Actually, one of the skateboards was mine, but I don't plan on skateboarding in the future.

I haven't been into the nearby convenience store in what feels like years. It felt very different inside, though it's the same space and selling the same stuff, so it's not *that* different. But the scratch cards behind the counter were displayed differently--they were in a waterfall, just pouring down from the back wall. Part of this impression may have been because they were mainly of just two or three types (?) and those were colored in greens and blues (?) Seems like when I go to the customer service counter at the supermarket, where scratch cards are also sold, it's more of an iridescent rainbow affair, like scales of different colored fishes have been made into gambling opportunities. But here it was blues and greens. American money colors, I suppose.

When I say "scratch cards," I mean those instant-play lottery tickets where you scratch off a silver covering and you maybe win some money. They're an addiction opportunity that doesn't entice me at all, but I know lots of people do buy them. And buy lots of them.

Do you ever buy scratch cards? If so, have you ever one a good amount? And if so, what (if you feel like sharing) did you use it for?

The cashier was a very tiny, very young looking girl. Like I might have guessed fourteen. But probably even in our new, child-labor-laws-are-to-be-laughed-away reality, she was actually more like ... sixteen. I was buying, among other things, carrots. A five-pound bag of big, fat carrots.

"Wow," the cashier murmured. "These are really big carrots."

"They really are!" I agreed.

"I wish I could get my brother to grow carrots," she said, all wistful and dreamy.

"Does your brother have a garden?" I asked.

"Yes. He just started it. He just graduated."

"Oh! Congratulations to him."

"He wants to study botany."

"Wow, that's great. I have a nephew who's studying something like that." (Actually he's studying permaculture and sustainable agriculture.)

"Is he successful?" she asked, very serious.

"Well, he only just finished his freshman year," I said. "But yes, so far he is."

She smiled a dreamy smile. "That's great."

--I look forward to seeing her again, the dreamy cashier who appreciates big fat carrots. I hope she can get her brother to grow some.

There's a meadow near me that I love, especially in May and June. Yesterday I was driving home, and there was a couple standing in the pink mist of ragged robin, her looking like she had stepped out of a fantasy story, him looking enchanted. I turned the car around, pulled over, jumped out, and went plowing through the long grass toward them like some kind of zombie on the attack.

"You guys look so romantic, standing here in the long grass!" I said. They both looked understandably flustered, me accosting them like that, but they were good natured about it.

"Oh--" said the guy. "Well she needed some photos, so I was just helping her out."

I imagine now that she's an up-and-coming singer who sings fantasy-style songs à la Within Temptation or something. He was taking photos for her album cover, or her website. Or maybe she's a writer ... and he's taking photos for her author photo, or her website.

So it wasn't romance after all--no rings of woven grass exchanged as the breeze ruffles hair and wildflowers. But it still looked romantic, so I asked if I could take a picture.

"Sure--how do you want us to pose?"

"Just ... like you were ... like you're talking."



In other news, my first-time brewing experiment, El Salvadoran-style chicha as taught to me by my tutee's mother, via my tutee, is beginning to actually smell alcoholic. (I had to start over once as my first attempt to malt the corn--that was what I was doing, though I didn't know it--got too moldy. This is take two.) Wohoo!

This picture was lying in the road amid sharp fragments of glass.



It's just a print--here is one of its jagged edges, as if it were cut with scissors.



But you can see its appeal



I took it home. It's the year of the tiger, after all.

Here's something else from the day: labeled drawers:



You'll have to click through and then click magnify to see, but the drawers say "Stamps, Supplies, Janelle, Pending, Envelopes, *Italian flag w/soccer balls*, Deposit/WDL/Loan Slips, Lollipops."

You can tag yourself! I am Pending but one day I hope to be Lollipops.

My neighbors to the right, the mom dresses her two little daughters in matching clothes, they have fleets of dolls, and for Easter they got armfuls of plush peeps. The neighbors to the left, dad and little daughter bond over knife throwing. SO METAL.

Throwing (that's my laundry you can see hanging up in the background)



Retrieval



The next toss hit the target. My neighbor looked up at me, beaming with pride--as well she should! Little heroine. You will definitely want her in your D&D party.

(How handy that I already have a tag called "knives"!)

All neighborhoods have these little landmarks. This broad, flat rock at the edge of mine has become very popular during pandemic times:



I see couples sitting here all the time. There's a woman who comes with a blind man; sometimes women-who-walk-for-exercise sit and chat here. Yesterday it was these girls, who said they didn't mind if I posted their picture--so I am!



Bless you, friendship rock.

I've been having a lot of fun with the girls next door. Last Saturday I read them Mousekin's Golden House, and unbeknownst to me, their mom took some pictures:





I said offhand to the older sister that she should write a story ... and the next day SHE CAME BACK TO ME WITH ONE. (I felt so influential!) And it's adorable. It's about the family's cats, Tulip and Cheeto:

( Tulip and Cheeto Life )

They've also joined in when I've done chalk drawings recently. Here's my cardinal with red-winged blackbird on a pumpkin...


And their accompanying pieces of art:



... I'll leave you with the chipmunk king. Recent rains have erased him, but he was a just and generous overlord while he reigned.

This day had some marvel to it. The neighborhood felt very festive--the neighbors next to us and diagonally across the street had both put up tents for their kids to play in, and the across-the-street neighbors were sitting outside all day, chatting with various visitors, masked. Their little boy and the next-door little boy were playing together, masked, so let it not be said that little kids won't wear masks.

Here's the next-door neighbor, posing for me:



His little sister wasn't wearing a mask at this moment, but later on she was sporting a disposable one:



The tall one came over, first time since the plague struck, and the healing angel and her significant other came over too, and we toasted marshmallows and had lettuce that another neighbor had given us, and tomatoes and pickles and sausages and eggs. The wood from the fire smelled as fragrant as incense.

Coming home from dropping the tall one back at his apartment, I saw the full moon, blushing pink. This photo is a poor snapshot--I know you will find beautiful photos of tonight's moon if you look. But I pulled into an empty parking lot to get this one. Sometimes blurry is just right.



And then later this evening, someone in the apartment complex through the woods from us was shooting off pretty serious fireworks, and you could make them out through the nighttime trees, and they were beautiful. This doesn't capture it, except to give you the feel of mysterious lights in the darkness:



Have people watched Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts? We just finished season one, and I loved the soundtrack so much! I played everyone the song from the last episode in season one, "Purple Jaguar Eye"
Oh purple jaguar eye
Open up and be alive
See the world in vivid colors
There's no turning back
You've got all the love you need
To run surefooted, newly freed

Two days ago was World Bee Day. One day ago, in the evening, my neighbor up the street reported on FB that he had a swarm of bees in the branches of one of his oak trees.

A swarm of bees! I've never been so lucky as to see a swarm of bees. A swarm of bees is like a fairy hunt, a wild racing, everyone together, the queen at the lead. HOW COOL.

Today, a woman who raises goats and has two beehives came to relocate the swarm. I got to see her work. I can't begin to convey how magical it was to be within this globe of whirling bees, the intense buzzing, as she worked to get at the crook in the branch where--she presumed--the queen was. She worked with cheerful calm and grace. Here are some photos:

Most of the time she was atop her minivan



At one point her son or grandson got up and helped.



Here she's carefully putting the key piece of branch into the box where she's collecting the bees.



A box of bees!



The goddess of bees--if you click through to Flickr and click "magnify" twice, you will see a bee perched on her eyebrow.



Once the branch was in the box, you could feel the bees calming down, the whirl of energy beginning to settle.

The side is open so those few bees who are still on the outside can climb in:



To top off the wonder of it all, the wife in the family whose house all this happened in told us a story about her husband. What you have to know about him is that he's always been very lawn-proud, always putting herbicides on to keep it pure grass. But....

"He started getting interested in honeybees and what was happening to them, the declines. The other day I saw him bowed over, looking at a dandelion in the grass. 'There's a bee on it,' he said triumphantly. He said, 'I'm so sorry I spent so much time trying to get rid of dandelions, not knowing how important they were for the bees.'"

I felt in that moment like the whole world had been saved.

Here's a beautiful instrumental track, "cerca de abelhas" (close to bees) to go along with this bee story.