Asakiyume mita

Here are three photos for you. Two I've shared elsewhere on the interwebs, so some of you will have seen them before, but the first one is making its world premiere right here, right now!

Dancing a cumbia with a candle.

Last month we went to see Yeison Landero and his band play cumbia in Amherst. (Here's what his music is like--he throws his head back and goes into a beatific trance as he plays.) It was marvelous.



When we were last in Colombia, we had one very brief session of learning to dance ;-) The teacher showed us several different styles of cumbia dancing, including one where one partner (traditionally, the guy) takes off his hat and holds it high, then low, as the two partners twirl round. That night in Amherst, the venue was full of people dancing their hearts out, including this one girl wielding a candle like a hat. How great to be dancing with fire!**

Ice Eye

Sometimes the frozen beaver pond glares up at you with a critical eye! (The eye is created by people opening a hole in the ice for ice fishing. It refreezes, and then it's opened again, and so on.)



Popcorn Blossoms



From swollen buds, just about to unfurl, to a double-petaled flower in all its glory, popcorn blossoms are rightly celebrated for their beauty. As the classical poet wrote

Seeing them explode
ought to be the end of it.
These popcorn blossoms!
--Nothing can keep their buttery goodness
from lingering on my fingers.

(apologies to the poet Sosei and the translator larryhammer for my abuse of Kokinshū poem no. 47. You can read more of Larry's for-real translations in Ice Melts in the Wind: The Seasonal Poems of the Kokinshu.)


**Actually we think it was an electric candle. But let's imagine!

Every year I marvel over the tiny flowers of grass. Every year I can't resist taking pictures of them.



And every year I want to rub soft rabbit-foot clover on my cheek:



And make crowns of bindweed:



And I have nothing to say or tell you about these things, but if you were with me, I'd pull your arm and make you look at them, so here they are.

And then I'd say to you, do you know what I found out about, from khiemtran? Fishing with helium balloons, and before there were helium balloons, fishing with kites! Do you not love it?! I love it. I want to tell Em about fishing with kites.