Asakiyume mita

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...



and then came a box of chicks!



"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]

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.

AT THIS VERY MOMENT at Worldcon in Glasgow, the panel "The Science, Fiction, and Ethics of Terraforming" is happening. In the program guide, the final sentence in the description asks,

"Even if we do [have the ability to terraform], should we, if the world has the potential to develop life of its own?"

What do people think? More broadly, how do people feel about settling on other planets, both in fiction and irl?

It's my observation that H sapiens haven't, so far in our history, looked at a place and said, "Oh, but we'd best not disturb it--it's got its own thing going on"--not when self-interest was propelling us to go there for some reason or other. The only thing that seems to stop us from doing things is a counterbalancing self-interest. So I doubt that principled self-restraint will stand in humanity's way if we develop an ability to mold a place to meet our needs.

My experience of terraforming in fiction is limited to the Genesis planet in the OS Star Trek movies, Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time and sequels (very awesomely done in that series--well, first two; still haven't read the third), and Tade Thompson's Far from the Light of Heaven). I'm thinking of terraforming as something different from living in domed/shielded cities in an inhospitable place.

What other examples do you guys have?

You know the cloth bags you can get that come with an attached tiny sack that you can stuff them into? (ChicoBags are one manufacturer--that's what I have.)



(When you're using it as a bag, you turn it the other way out so the attached pouch doesn't show.)

The other day I was using mine, and the guy who was putting my stuff in my bag for me seemed especially interested in that little attached pouch.

"Clever, isn't it," I said. "It means the bag folds up really small for you to carry it."

"It's also perfect for holding hot peppers," he said.

And then I saw that what he'd been doing was carefully inserting the two hot peppers I'd bought into that tiny pouch.

ADORABLE!

When Crinklewing (as my husband dubbed him) was blown away, I thought that was the end of the story, and so I made the entry with that endpoint.

But stories keep flowing! So much of storytelling is about deciding where to begin and end your tale ...

Later that day, I found Crinklewing again in my yard. All through the day, I took breaks from work to continue what I described in the last post, taking him to different flowers, tempting him with sugar-water. As evening came round, he climbed up on my sweatshirt, right up to my neck! And then he fluttered off, back into the milkweed patch by my door.

Or so I thought: later I found him on my kitchen floor.

All right, friend, spend the night here in my house, where it's warm, I thought. I put him on a brightly colored piece of cloth on my ironing board and wet it with sugar-water.

proboscis out!


Today is another sunny day. I don't want Crinklewing to end his days cooped up in a dim indoors, so I decided to take him to a pollinator garden by an elementary school. It's a beautiful place, and he looked at home stretched out on a ... not sure what it is. [ETA: Likely Tithonia, also known as Mexican sunflower--ID courtesy of pameladean--thank you!] A bright flower.



But I heard a group of kids and a teacher coming along, and I realized in this spot, he would be vulnerable to lots of people noticing him and possibly poking at him. So I took him down the hill to a wild spot with lots of goldenrod (which has delicious nectar beloved of bees and butterflies) and set him there. Lots of food, and warm sun.



As I came up the hill, one of the little kids greeted me. "Hi! How are you? What are you doing?" And I realized the group was a special ed class (not from the greeting, from other things). There was one child in a wheelchair with a screen for touching for communication.

I told the kid about Crinklewing.

"Can we go see?" the kid asked.

"Let's just look from here," the teacher said. "It's better for the butterfly."

That seemed to satisfy the kid. He and the others got busy exclaiming over the flowers, squatting down to look at things, asking questions--clearly learning and enjoying themselves.

All crinklewings of one sort or another. It feels too on the nose, but it's really what happened.

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!

Last weekend mallorys_camera invited me to pick sour cherries and blueberries at Samascott Orchard in Kinderhook, NY.

What an experience! I've never been to such a huge orchard. You pay to enter and then can *drive* to the place where you want to pick. mallorys_camera and I scoffed at this, but soon we realized that people who come here to pick are not playing, and with the amounts they're picking (pounds and pounds--enough for all their home canning; enough for their roadside stall or their home pie business), yes, you would want your car nearby.

And wow, what an international bunch of people it attracts. Did you think you needed to go to a big metropolitan center to hear a panoply of languages? Why no! Come to this orchard! The first family we ran into were exclaiming over the unripe fruit of a particular tree.

"I've never seen this fruit in America!" said a man.

"What is it?" I asked.

"I don't know what it's called in English, but in Turkish we call it [word I don't remember] which is something like 'sour apricot'"

He turned and started talking to another man in Turkish.

Like us, this family was trying to get to cherry trees that hadn't been picked over. Eventually we hit the jackpot. "Dad!" a kid in their family called. "This tree has two thousand cherries!!"

Some of the trees were so loaded with cherries that branches were weighed down to the ground.

Here are some of those two thousand cherries:





On our way to the blueberries, we could hear families speaking in some Southeast Asian language, and when I was crouched down picking, I could hear a guy from Israel (probably? from some of the things he referenced) talking to a woman about the history of the YMCA. "I want to write about the transition from empire to [unintelligible] through the YMCA."

Here are some blueberries and milkweed.



I heard a girl exclaim, "This one is as big as my thumb!"

While we were picking blueberries a handsome young guy with a Jamaican accent tried to interest us in a cruise on a yacht. Since mallorys_camera and I are, shall we say, of an age that makes us unlikely partners for handsome young guys with Jamaican accents ("Speak for yourself!" says MC from off stage), I suspect he was looking for generous patronesses, which is hilarious, but that accent is beautiful, and I enjoyed the flirtation all the same.

As we headed back to our cars we passed some Polish speakers, and also a South Asian mom using an umbrella to shelter her child, who was sleeping in a stroller, from the sun (there was actually sun that day--but then it did rain, of course: practically every day this month it's rained at least a little and more often than not spectacularly).

Before paying for our haul, we decided to have some lavender ice cream (marvelous!). The wall carries lists of plates of cars caught stealing as a warning not to try similar:



They, too, are not playing: they search your car when you go to pay. They opened my overnight bag that had my previous-day's clothes in it.

paying, and car search


While we were eating ice cream, I saw these two. The woman's skirt was full and flouncy, and then she popped that hat on her head and looked straight out of a brochure for Bolivia or Peru.



It was a wonderful experience--super company, beautiful outdoor activity, and great people watching/listening.

The Diocese of Springfield, MA, has a new bishop, and bishops apparently get ecclesiastical coats of arms. ("They are princes of the church," Wakanomori said. "Their residences are called palaces." I wonder if that's even true in Springfield...)

The new bishop's coat of arms, as best as we could tell, seeing it via a televised Mass, looked like it was designed by a very imaginative child.

"Is that a rocket ship on the right?" I asked Wakanomori.

"Maybe it's a very thin castle?" he suggested in return.

"The stuff on the side looks like a genealogy--only a parthenogenic genealogy, because everyone descends from a single person instead of a couple.

"I think there's a flying saucer up top," Waka said.

We really, really needed to see the coat of arms up close, so we did some digging, and the interwebs came to our aid.

Behold! A flying saucer hovers above a shield, the left side of which shows a single-person skull rowing on a river and the right side of which shows a rocket to the moon. On either side of the shield are parthenogenic octopus genealogies, whose ultimate origins are The Flying Saucer



And my interpretation:

It's a drought here, and there's a water ban. Grass lawns are burned gold except where trees shade them---there they're still green. (I don't have much of a grass lawn: mine is a lot of thyme and clover and hawkweed and sorrel. Where I have grass, it's the same as everyone else's.)

I went for a walk this morning under a drifting gray sky and saw many good things. I didn't have a camera so you'll have to bear with words. I saw the red-winged blackbird royalty, the princes with their scarlet epaulets and gold fringe, and their wives, more drab but just as territory-proud. I saw elderflowers and, on the corner where I always see it at this time of year, tiny bindweed flowers. At the community garden I saw a flock of goldfinches, which my sister says is called a charm--a charm of goldfinches--perching on tomato stakes and then flying off in their rising-dipping flight, like needles through cloth.

Across the street is the highway department, where, at 7 am, they were having, apparently, a convocation of orange Asplundh bucket trucks, maybe/probably to cut tree branches from around utility wires around town. Highway department employees were in fluorescent green t-shirts and jackets, like firefighters. I saw one guy arriving, hurrying out of his car.
"Is it bucket truck day today?" I asked.
"You bet," he said.

Along the way, I saw chipmunks, which dashed off under the Virginia creeper and poison ivy. One was so tiny, the size of a mouse instead of a rat.
"How did you get so tiny?" I asked, and then began thinking about if you could grow small instead of big.