Asakiyume mita

Back in December, the daughter of the novelist Grace Lin, who lives in the region, was creating and selling magical ducks as a fundraiser for the emergency fund her school's PTO had set up for families in need. I bought a few, and today several of them have taken residence in the nooks and crannies of the wall of the nearby railway bridge:



Here are a couple from a distance--can you see them?



And up close:



Here's another at a distance and up close:





And the last one:





It's kind of a stressful bridge to walk under because it's only wide enough to permit one car and there's a fairly frequent number of cars (... for a semirural area--the road is a shortcut to highways south), but it does get some foot traffic (people like me). I guess these constitute Easter eggs, in the internet sense of the word, for those who happen to look at the wall?

I was saying to malorys_camera that a switch has flipped in my brain and now I'm tired of thinking about COVID 19. The other day I went several tens of minutes without thinking about it at all, and that was great! (Don't mistake me; I'm not saying that it's not serious--not saying that at all--I'm just saying that having my thoughts chained to it feels like being Alex in Clockwork Orange when he's got his eyes stuck open and is being force-fed Beethoven's Ninth. You could be exhausted by something as lovely as Beethoven's Ninth if the circumstances were right, and let's be real: COVID 19 is not that lovely.)

So for a change of scene, let me show you the Hardware of the Street which I discovered. I mean! Programming for a whole street! Admittedly a street in a housing development in western Massachusetts, so like, not the most crucial of streets. But just imagine what directives and protocols it might hold. What if roads communicated up to the things that pass along them?



And speaking of, you'll enjoy a year's worth of animals passing over this natural bridge (condensed into five minutes--try watching just one! You'll be hooked), if you haven't already encountered it on your social media feeds. You'll be surprised at the variety of animals using it--fun to see the river in different states, as well.

I feel very proprietary about the boardwalk near our house because I helped it get built (in a roundabout way--I didn't actually help build it). So, when someone leaves a crumpled-up can of soda or a Dunkin Donuts coolatta cup on it, I pick those things up, and I try to keep the marsh it goes through clear of rubbish, too. I love the marsh even more than the boardwalk.

When I saw some mischief makers had managed to push a shopping cart over the boardwalk rails and into the long grass in the marsh, I was frustrated. It would be very hard to fetch the shopping cart back out: everything's overgrown right now, including the sharp-thorned rosa multiflora and the poison ivy.

This was the situation:



The sides of the boardwalk are chain-link, so it's extra hard to get the cart up (and it must have been hard to push it over into the marsh, too)--you can't just reach it onto the boardwalk; you have to get it up over the guardrails, which are about my chest height.

I thought that if we had metal hooks and ropes, maybe we could get it up. So I bought some at the hardware store, and the healing angel and I cut the cord and threaded it through the holes in the hooks.



Then we tried fishing for the cart, and we caught it! And we were able to turn it rightside up. But it was VERY heavy. Heavier than I was bargaining on. So I checked, and seeing that there wasn't any poison ivy or other pernicious plant in that part of the marsh, I went out to the road, climbed over the guard rail, and went under the boardwalk into the marsh. I was thinking maybe we'd have more luck just pushing it out from underneath the boardwalk, straight onto the road, rather than trying to lift it over the boardwalk's rails.

Here's us fishing for it. The healing angel is actually rail thin, not beefy the way I've drawn him, whereas I'm more middle-age rounded than the aspirational me I've drawn.



Fortunately it's been pretty dry this summer, and where I was walking was muddy but not actually flowing. I was wearing flip-flops. Once underneath, I trying pushing the cart in the direction I'd come, but it wouldn't move. Hell, carts can be hard to push on smooth supermarket floors if their wheels get jammed, and there was plenty of long grass and mud to jam its wheels there.

So we were back to our original plan. We realized we could inch the cart up bit by bit if I lifted and he pulled, and in between pulls he tied the ropes to the chain-link. We got it up pretty high, and at just the right moment a family came walking by, and the father was able to grab the handle, and between him and the healing angel, they got it back onto the board walk.

Here's us before the family came along


Then I pushed it back to the supermarket while the healing angel rolled up our cords into the neat bundles in the photo.

I felt so deliriously pleased with myself! I saw a problem, thought up a solution, got the bits and pieces needed for the solution, and tried it, and it worked. I don't know if that's ever happened before--not with some mechanical, technical thing, anyway. I know it's a stretch to count this as mechanical or technical, but I do. And the healing angel seemed pretty pleased too. And we did it together! And we enlisted help from passersby. It was good, very good.

And now the marsh is no longer hampered by a shopping cart. It's all just long grass and song sparrows again. Yay!

On my walk this morning I was thinking how on a walk some days ago, I'd found a robin eggshell. I looked down and found a cardinal eggshell. Further along on the walk I found a luna moth wing: it was a morning for sweet finds.



In the evening, as the sun was setting and streetlamps were lighting up, a cardinal came and perched on one. From newly hatched to adult in one day.

Later in the evening, when it was quite dark, I went to pick some cilantro, and the first firefly of the season was in the cilantro patch, lighting up the underside of the cilantro leaves--and he paid my hand a visit, too.

Earlier in the day, some kids were playing soccer on the common, and one of them was wearing a Brazilian flag as a cloak. I had only my cell phone to take a picture with, but:


Viva Brasil!

I guess we know who he's rooting for in the World Cup!

I am writing a little something with bridges in it, and almost every day I walk along a bridge, and as I walk, I think about bridge folktales--mainly bridge battles: the three billy goats and the troll, Robin Hood and Little John, Benke and Yoshitsune. Can you think of any more bridge battles in folktales or legend?


Benke meets Yoshitsune on Gojô Bridge, by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (Source)