Asakiyume mita

Spent some time walking along the side of the highway today. I always feel strange and liminal when I do that because it's not something people generally do. The shoulders can be narrow, cars and trucks can be going fast--it's not set up to be walked along. It's a strange sensation to move through space in a way that no one is expecting you to. It can make me feel like I have superpowers: since I'm covering the space at a different speed, from a different vantage point, I'm able to notice things that otherwise don't get seen.

Like today. I discovered this Letter A lying on the shoulder:



It's 3.5 inches by 3.5 inches by 1.25 inches. From the front it looks like a child's alphabet block, but only one face is carved and painted, and it's not a cube. And it's pretty roughly made:





Questions:

What do you think the original purpose or use of this Letter A was?

What, now, should or can the A stand for?

Yesterday I was walking to the post office, and I came across one of those plushie reindeer antlers that people put on their cars as a seasonal decoration. It was lying by the side of the road.

"Either the car was a male, shedding late, or a female, shedding very early," I mused. [Reindeer antler facts here! Learn the truth behind the social media posts!]

Later I passed a small silver glint. A dime.

"Hey! Hey!" the dime called. "You're just going to walk by and leave me here, as if I were a PENNY or something? You're so rich you can't use a dime?! Well not for long, sister, not with that attitude!"

I went back and picked it up.

On the way back from the post office, I saw a perfect, long, tapered, thick orange carrot lying in the middle of someone's front lawn.

Ah, evanescence. One moment you're a snowman in the prime of life, and the next moment, you're just a carrot, waiting to be carried off by a posse of squirrels or an opportunistic deer.

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 saw these fun salsa labels last time I was at my dad's. They were in a little corner deli in his town. I would read a graphic novel illustrated by whoever did the designs, a graphic novel about Hot Mama, Mr. Medium, Mild Child, and Auntie Verde. Hot Mama is a single mom, an artist and adventurer. Mild Child is her kid. Auntie Verde works for a big company and is always getting her sister and nephew out of fixes, but she's not really a corporate type: she loves to garden and knows the names of all the birds. Mr. Medium is a mysterious visitor to their town. He seems to have Powers. But what are his intentions??

The power of capsaicin will of course be key. Maybe each chapter will feature a different chile pepper. Like the Peruvian Aji Charapita pepper, which I think is what I brought back with me from the Amazon.

Click through to see the picture larger and zoom in on all the cute details. See the pepper on each of their outfits?



ETA: The scenarios I've imagined for them are pret-ty close to what Larry's Salsa has on their website (excepting Mr. Medium, who is much less ambiguous in their telling). Check them out HERE.

OMG, and the company was based in the town I grew up in! But the cute labels date from when the elderly founder sought an investor, himself being 72 and wanting a break. But the investing company is fairly local too, so that's good. Read more in this trade magazine article, where you can see the much more staid original labels.

I'm inordinately pleased with this guy, so pleased that I'm sharing him all over the place. Look at his head! Look at his curved arms, his nicely patterned legs, his power source at his middle.

He's a champion, I tell you. He'll... do what rice cracker champions do, feats as yet unknown.

I thought I'd do a messages-in-bottles writing prompt tomorrow, which meant I needed to collect a bunch of bottles, so after work I just walked the main drag near where I live, and sure enough, turned up PLENTY of little nips bottles.

I cleaned them and covered them with glitter. Fingers crossed that the writing exercise goes okay.



I didn't post that image directly into Dreamwidth. I posted it to Flickr instead and then copied it from there into here. I pay for both my Flickr account and my Dreamwidth account, but Flickr is solely for archiving photos, and it has much more storage available, and this is an issue because in three months I'll cease to have a paid LJ account--I'll still crosspost there (for a while anyway), but there's no point in paying for both it AND Dreamwidth--which means I'll lose access to any photos that are stored there. That turns out to be quite a few photos, so right now I'm engaged in the cumbersome process of taking any images that were stored there and storing them here, instead. Otherwise, come May, bunches of entries will suddenly have little question marks where once they had pictures.

It's a weird process. I'm working backward from the present. As I do, I'm unlocking all my back entries, which somehow, when I poured LJ into Dreamwidth, came over as friends locked. It's kind of melancholy making. I'm only back in 2016, and I've had a journal since 2006.

I wonder what I'm doing, a little. Why does this even matter? ¯\(ツ)/¯

The parking lot at the supermarket was thick with road salt, as if they're expecting a storm, but I don't think there's a storm coming.

It's not much to look at in this photo, but: all the white spots are salt crystals.



It was so beautiful up close, like gemstones:



You might gather them up and count yourself rich, only to have the dissolve if--well, if what? If you kept them in a velvet-lined box you'd probably never be the wiser. But if you tried to set them in silver or gold to wear at your neck or wrists, you'd be in for a sad surprise.

A truck was pulled up in a driveway in my neighborhood. It said "Devine Overhead Doors." (Here's a photo from the company's website, if you'd like to know precisely what it looked like.) Now, it seems that "overhead door" means a garage door that rolls up, but my thoughts went like this:

Devine Divine Overhead Doors



It reminds me of one of the stories in The Ladies of Grace Adieu, where angels poke their heads out of windows in the sky.

In very slightly tangential news, I gave up on Every Heart a Doorway, not for any flaw on its part, but because I realized--belatedly--that I don't like sucking all portal experiences into one framework.

When I went out this morning, the sun was just leaving its nest of trees on the horizon-woods, shining golden white. Stretched across the sky were the white ghost-bones of some giant fish, an ancestor fish--the waters of morning revealed those bones. At the houses playing host this Thanksgiving Day, cars were clustered quietly, like sleeping pups or kittens. High up in a tree somewhere, one bird was calling; on the ground, just a few leaves and chipmunks were scurrying.

I found a golden fairy shoe, so tiny, but I was running, so I didn't stop to pick it up. If it's still there later in the day, and I get a chance before taking my portion of the feast to my brother's house, I will take a picture.

ETA: Two pictures of the fairy shoe--the second is to show how tiny it is.