Asakiyume mita

When I came home from Readercon, there was a tornado watch, and so rather than be on the awful interstate between Quincy, MA, and B'town, likely trapped in a traffic jam (they are pretty much a guarantee for this time of the year, traveling between western and eastern Massachusetts) awaiting a funnel of doom, I decided to go home no-highways (which really just means no interstates), aided by my phone. It took me the route I was expecting it would take me: along state highway rt. 9, which runs east-west through the middle of the state. For much of the journey it's scenic towns, and there are plenty of places to stop if you need to shelter from a tornado. And a constant reassuring progression of Dunkin Donuts (it doesn't go through Stow, MA).

So yesterday, having dropped Wakanomori at the airport, I decided to do similar as soon as I escaped the traffic jam surrounding the airport. But this time, maybe because it was rush hour and so rt 9 was also quite thick with traffic, the app directed me north and further north, always managing to inch west too. Are you sure you know where I want to go? --It claimed it did.

( mildly entertaining journey )

Anyway, I made it home! And this morning a bobcat walked through my yard, and the two of us exchanged a long and meaningful look.

Also my Tikuna teacher texted me "Guungua choru maune wa cu ñemata," and I understood (almost) the whole thing without her translating,** so life is good. 😁

**siempre estás presente en mi corazón/you're always present in my heart

On Thursday I picked up Wakanomori from the airport--he's back from the UK. We stopped around 7 pm at a rest stop on I-90, and as I was coming out of the bathrooms, I noticed a Verizon payphone, and on it, this remarkable sticker.



It starts with a blessing and a prayer, then turns to special needs: a job, help with Social Security and EBT (for people overseas, this is government food assistance), and then on to the lesser financial deities.

After snapping the photo, I wandered back to the table where we were eating, but my curiosity got the better of me. What happens if I press *10? What happens if I press *12? Or any of the others. So I went back. I picked up the receiver, but there was nothing.

It said on the machine that it was 50 cents for a local call, so I put in two quarters, but they fell right through and came out the coin return. I felt more than disappointed; I felt bereft. A scam and a prayer--but then the phone goes and doesn't even work. When I wrote about it on Twitter, a friend said, "This feels like a metaphor for ... something," and it really does. There's some kind of archaeology of desperation and last-ditch hopes there.

I had to walk back to the house along the highway this morning, after dropping the car (the remaining car...) off for scheduled maintenance.

It was so cold, penetratingly cold, killingly cold, and windy--but it was morning, and the sun was out.



This afternoon, walking that same route back to the mechanic's, it was a race between me and darkness. The clouds were rosy when I set out, and there was incandescent golden-orange brilliance behind the supermarket. But the light was dying and the wind was fierce, and I felt *very fragile* walking against the stream of homeward-bound cars. Almost no one walks that bit of road. Where there was briefly a sidewalk, I passed a woman walking her dog. Otherwise, I had my footprints from the morning for company. Somehow, my journey felt supernatural. When I was walking, step after step, through the crusty snow, pushing aside briars and the skeletons of mugwort or goldenrod on the safe side of a crash barrier, I felt that I wasn't in the same world as the people driving in cars. I was in some huge, howling, dark world, a world of coldness that would be happy to extinguish every living thing. When I made it to the mechanic's and opened the door into that warmth, I felt staggeringly relieved.

And then I drove home. And I myself was in that nice, ordinary world that I'd been on the outside of, walking on the roadside. But I could remember it.

I liked the people who were waiting at the red light with me at the intersection of US route 202 and Massachusetts route 33. I was in the middle of three lanes, with my windows rolled down. To my left I could hear pleasant music. I stole a glance: the driver was large-necked, middle-aged woman with a relaxed and pleasant face. To my right was a guy on a motorcycle. He had a grizzled beard, maybe six inches long, that tapered to a point. Someone in a pickup truck driving across the intersection honked and hollered, and the guy on the motorcycle laughed and waved. The pickup truck person waved back. In my rearview mirror, I could see the guy behind me, young man with a baseball cap on and a little figurine of a rooster on his dashboard. It was a good smattering of humanity.

I feel very proprietary about the boardwalk near our house because I helped it get built (in a roundabout way--I didn't actually help build it). So, when someone leaves a crumpled-up can of soda or a Dunkin Donuts coolatta cup on it, I pick those things up, and I try to keep the marsh it goes through clear of rubbish, too. I love the marsh even more than the boardwalk.

When I saw some mischief makers had managed to push a shopping cart over the boardwalk rails and into the long grass in the marsh, I was frustrated. It would be very hard to fetch the shopping cart back out: everything's overgrown right now, including the sharp-thorned rosa multiflora and the poison ivy.

This was the situation:



The sides of the boardwalk are chain-link, so it's extra hard to get the cart up (and it must have been hard to push it over into the marsh, too)--you can't just reach it onto the boardwalk; you have to get it up over the guardrails, which are about my chest height.

I thought that if we had metal hooks and ropes, maybe we could get it up. So I bought some at the hardware store, and the healing angel and I cut the cord and threaded it through the holes in the hooks.



Then we tried fishing for the cart, and we caught it! And we were able to turn it rightside up. But it was VERY heavy. Heavier than I was bargaining on. So I checked, and seeing that there wasn't any poison ivy or other pernicious plant in that part of the marsh, I went out to the road, climbed over the guard rail, and went under the boardwalk into the marsh. I was thinking maybe we'd have more luck just pushing it out from underneath the boardwalk, straight onto the road, rather than trying to lift it over the boardwalk's rails.

Here's us fishing for it. The healing angel is actually rail thin, not beefy the way I've drawn him, whereas I'm more middle-age rounded than the aspirational me I've drawn.



Fortunately it's been pretty dry this summer, and where I was walking was muddy but not actually flowing. I was wearing flip-flops. Once underneath, I trying pushing the cart in the direction I'd come, but it wouldn't move. Hell, carts can be hard to push on smooth supermarket floors if their wheels get jammed, and there was plenty of long grass and mud to jam its wheels there.

So we were back to our original plan. We realized we could inch the cart up bit by bit if I lifted and he pulled, and in between pulls he tied the ropes to the chain-link. We got it up pretty high, and at just the right moment a family came walking by, and the father was able to grab the handle, and between him and the healing angel, they got it back onto the board walk.

Here's us before the family came along


Then I pushed it back to the supermarket while the healing angel rolled up our cords into the neat bundles in the photo.

I felt so deliriously pleased with myself! I saw a problem, thought up a solution, got the bits and pieces needed for the solution, and tried it, and it worked. I don't know if that's ever happened before--not with some mechanical, technical thing, anyway. I know it's a stretch to count this as mechanical or technical, but I do. And the healing angel seemed pretty pleased too. And we did it together! And we enlisted help from passersby. It was good, very good.

And now the marsh is no longer hampered by a shopping cart. It's all just long grass and song sparrows again. Yay!

The flowers are wearing flower crowns these days, and going dancing:


What better thing to do as midsummer approaches?

The last time I walked this way, a truck was pulled up onto the sandy shore at the edge of the sea of meadow grass. A guy was lying beside, and sort of under, the truck. I think I saw tools under there--no doubt he was repairing something--but I kind of imagined maybe there was a lunch under there too? He was on his cell phone. Maybe he was consulting about the truck's problem. Or maybe he was just chatting with someone as he took his ease, sheltered from the road by his truck, looking out over the ripping grass and wildflowers.


And speaking of trucks, look at the magnificent truck on this now-empty bottle of tea:



I think I may use it for a message in a bottle. And speaking of bottles for messages, I offered tiny decorated message-bottles as an extra incentive for time_shark's Kickstarter for Clockwork Phoenix 5, and it funded! And I have only three decorated bottles to hand, so needed to get a few more. Easily accomplished. Here is today's roadside haul:



Now I'll just wash them, and soon I'll be decorating.

By the way, Clockwork Phoenix 5 is open to submissions, so go ye forth and submit!

The snow's between two and three feet high on the ground, which means it's not easy to walk through without snow pants, which means you're confined to roads. I like walking on the snowmobile trails, but it's a matter of getting there ...

So I shoveled a path--the path I'd normally take--from my neighborhood road to the snowmobile trail.

It is a thing of beauty! Behold, its entrance:



Unfortunately, the snow plow, in widening the road, knocked snow into it...



But I brought my shovel as well as my camera. There. That's better!



( following the path my handiwork has carved... )

At last, it meets the snowmobile trail, which looks like a regular highway by comparison:



And now I can walk in the woods without snow pants, AND I can walk into town along the snowmobile path.

Both magical.

A footprint on the rail. Faint sign. Tracks on the tracks, for trackers to track.



Silver only at a certain time of day. Travel is always time dependent, it turns out. Destinations and routes change with the hour.