Asakiyume mita

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!

our daily dandelion

Everything smells beautiful right now, and the landscape is so many different colors; leaf hasn't subsided to leaf yet, and blossoms are everywhere.

My apple tree has never been so graced with flowers before:

Here is a road I walk every day. This photo is from yesterday, but this morning, when I passed this way, an oriole flew into an apple tree (not visible in this picture) and seemed to be sniffing the blossoms. Maybe it was sipping nectar. Maybe it was nibbling the petals. Maybe it was listening to whispered secrets--I don't know.



These are not the apple blossoms that the oriole was getting intimate with, but these are apple blossoms I especially love, because they're on a tree I grew from a seed.



Beautiful May ♥

Just imagine everything is golden-yellow. Birds everywhere are golden: yellow warblers with streaks of orange on their breasts, and goldfinches, and golden-orange orioles, and black-and-white bobolinks with golden heads. Even the red-winged blackbird, with his scarlet epaulets, has yellow gold on him: fringe for those epaulets. And all these birds are singing golden songs. The trees, meanwhile, are a hundred different hues of yellow and green, and in the tender new grass (which tastes like the scent of hay), there are dandelions, with stems a foot long and flowers the size of half-dollar coins.

Around the corner of one road,a car had pulled way up off the road and two women and a little boy were knee deep in the meadow, picking dandelions. One woman wore a loose, off-the-shoulder top; the other had purple-red hair. The boy seemed barely dandelion-height.

I was with teenybuffalo; it was about 5 pm. We smiled as we passed, and the purple-haired woman said, in an almost intoxicated voice, "You want one?" and we said sure, and Teeny put hers through the buttonholes of her vest, a boutonnière, and I stuck mine in my braid--souvenirs of the golden land.

no camera, so here is a vague sketch from memory

canada geese (these stayed; they were on their way further north)
woodcocks (maybe always here?)
killdeer, sandpipers (same?)
wood thrushes
catbirds
wrens
oriole
swifts

just yesterday (May 3), the first oriole, high in an old apple tree not yet in blossom, and the first swifts--maybe these were back sooner, but it was the first I'd seen them, darting up so high, burbling to themselves, splitting cloud from sky.

And the wren, with its song too big and loud to fit in its tiny body.

Meanwhile, the magnolias are dropping their petals, the violets are in drifts across lawns, and in the wetlands, the marsh marigolds are in bloom.