Asakiyume mita

I did a chalk drawing of an angel offering an apple to a fox (... if foxes can crave grapes in Aesop, then they can be offered apples)--I had the angel leaning out of a sky window because I love that conceit. The fox came out VERY wonky in the body, but I like his face.

The feet belong to the next-door neighbor girls






I finished right before a good, drenching rain, so now the angel is a ghost:



In other remarkable news, a plant grew in the pot I had planted calendulas in. It looked vaguely familiar--some kind of nightshade-family plant, but what? Not a potato; you can't accidentally plant a potato. The leaves were wrong for tomato, and they didn't match up with common nightshade that I see around. They were fuzzy and lovely. Recently it got buds, and finally a flower, and with THAT I was able to take to the internet.





It seems to be Physalis peruviana, known in English as Cape gooseberry or golden berry, and first encountered by me in Colombia under the name of uchuva. It was available as a compote every morning for breakfast where we stayed, and I bought a bag of them at the market the day we left.

It's a kind of ground cherry. A more common-for-here ground cherry is Physalis pruinosa--in fact, the first place we lived in western Massachusetts had those growing wild. And the flowers look pretty much identical--it would make more sense for P. pruinosa to pop up unannounced in my flowerpot than a plant that's native to Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia.

But the local ground cherry ... grows along the ground. It doesn't stand up straight. This is standing up, proud and tall--which is what P. peruviana does. And although it's not ***native*** to this area, it's **cultivated** all over the place.

Either way, it's edible. But I'm going to think of it as P. peruviana, and look forward to some home-grown uchuvas at some point.

Never mind: I remembered that the plant we had at the other house was a "clammy ground cherry," and THAT plant's botanical name is P. heterophylla and guess what. THAT is what I have. It stands up tall, too. Ahh, well. This one is edible too! Will see if I get any clammy ground cherries ;-)

I saw a scarecrow today--I thought it was a person, standing very still. It was a very realistic scarecrow.

Today was also a rainy day, so there were no shadows, no direct light, confusion of air and water as rain misted down, confusion of earth and air too, as hills and trees melted away into clouds. A good day for summoning ghosts . . .

You can do that, when the rain brings ghosts up near the surface of the earth. Sorcerer farmers trap them in old clothes like helium in balloons, and make them wander the fields, scaring away anything that trespasses, until the bright light of an unclouded day frees them.

Yeah, ghost scarecrows only work when the summer is wet. In parched farmlands shriveling under an unrelenting sun, I'm guessing sorcerer farmers rely on phantasmal illusions of sparks and flames to terrify intruders away.

A couple of weeks ago at the jail, there was a new-to-me CO, B--, at the programs desk. I was heading into the room I've been using for my tutoring when he said, "You know there's a ghost up here, right?"

Usually when people tell me things like this--in any circumstance, not just at the jail--I just go along with it amiably until I can get my bearings and figure out how I'm expected to react, but this time, I couldn't help it: I said, "This jail is only ten years old, and you're telling me there's a ghost?" (I could also have said, "I've been volunteering here for more than five years, and I'm only just now hearing about a ghost?")

"They think it's maybe a child, looking for love," he said.

Even at the time, and more so now as I'm writing this down, it struck me that if you didn't think of a ghost as the spirit of someone dead but rather as a coalescing of intense feelings connected with longed-for people, that sure: there could very well be something like that hanging about. Wakanomori suggested that it could be like Lady Rokujo, whose spirit leaves her body while she sleeps and haunts Genji's lovers, only in this case, children deprived of their parents, haunting the locus of their deprivation.

Anyway, I think I said something noncommittal like "Thanks for the heads up" or "I'll keep my eyes open."

Then this past Friday B-- was there again, along with M--, one of the first COs I ever talked to, a woman I like a lot. I mentioned to her that B-- had told me about the ghost, and he said, "Oh, M-- knows all about the ghost; she's had an encounter with it."

M-- nodded emphatically.

"What was it like?" I asked.

"Well, I had just had a drink of water from my bottle," she said, nodding toward her largish clear plastic water bottle, which was on the desk, "and I felt something really cold right at my waist. I thought maybe I'd spilled some of the water on myself, but when I touched the area, it was dry. Then it started tingling. I jumped away from the desk--I just had to walk away from there. It was like a little icy arm around my waist."

"It probably knew you were a mother," said B--. "It was probably looking for comfort."

I thought about how my imagination runs in different directions: If that had happened to me, I would have been as freaked out, but it would have been because I imagined I'd gotten sudden-onset neuropathy, or worse.

Or maybe not. I'm only there for one afternoon a week. The COs are there for 40 hours a week, and the inmates are there 24-7. Ten years is young for a building, but it's a long time to collect misery. Even I've seen a thing or two, in the slivers of time I'm there. Maybe if I was in M--'s shoes, I would have intuited it the way she did.