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

This entry repeats some of the stuff I said about brewing chicha in this entry, but consider this the revised, improved, and expanded version ;-)

In the rhyme "this is the house that jack built," there are these lines:

This is the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the rat that ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built. (etc.)

The picture always is of a sack. For example...


(Source: New York Public Library Digital Collections)

I never actually knew what malt was.

Fast-forward to my project with my tutee to make El Salvadoran chicha. The first step involved sprouting corn--keeping it warm and moist so it would put out a root and a little shoot... at which point, so my tutee told me (receiving instructions from her mother), we were supposed to wash the corn and... take off the root and the shoot. Well then WHY are we growing them? I wondered.

The answer is that when the corn starts sprouting, it makes an enzyme that turns starch into sugar, and we want this in the brewing process. I discovered this after my first attempt at getting the corn to sprout resulted in a moldy mess. I searched "sprouted corn brewing" on the interwebs and discovered this fact... and that sprouted grain is called malt. And that it keeps. So after you have sprouted it and taken the root and shoot off (this feels so cruel--poor corn just wants to make a corn plant, and you're stymying it), you can put it in a sack in your attic to feed a rat ... or for future brewing.

(Photo I sent to my tutee, in distress about my mold problem. You can see all the white roots, but also the strong yellow shoots, e.g. in the kernel directly above the red circle)



Take two was more successful. (This photo is earlier in the sprouting process--showing just roots, no shoots)




After washing, derooting, and desprouting the corn, you put it in a big old container with a tight lid and feed it water and--if you're making El Salvadoran chicha--panela (sugarcane juice that's been boiled down and thickened) each day. And for the first three days, you throw the liquid away each new day, but from the fourth day on you keep it and keep adding to it: more water, more panela, and, for flavor, you put in the rind of a pineapple.

during the first three days


from the fourth day


I decanted on day six or seven. It is only very mildly alcoholic--it would have gotten more alcoholic if I let it sit--but it did have a yeasty bite and a definite flavor of the panela and pineapple, very rich and sweet. I have NO IDEA if it tasted right, and how's this for humor: my tutee is very strict about no drugs, no alcohol, so she had never had it, so she wasn't sure if it was either. But her roommate is also from El Salvador and promised us it tasted just right. Maybe she was just humoring us? But maybe it really was right! La chicha salvadoreña de Lorena, mamá de S, my tutee :-)



total produced


The moldy malt I dumped into the compost bin, and it flourished:



I've transplanted it and now have some good-looking corn plants. In my experience, corn never does well with me--I get tiny ears with a couple of weird monster kernels and nothing else, but maybe this year will be different! We'll see.

Last weekend mallorys_camera invited me to pick sour cherries and blueberries at Samascott Orchard in Kinderhook, NY.

What an experience! I've never been to such a huge orchard. You pay to enter and then can *drive* to the place where you want to pick. mallorys_camera and I scoffed at this, but soon we realized that people who come here to pick are not playing, and with the amounts they're picking (pounds and pounds--enough for all their home canning; enough for their roadside stall or their home pie business), yes, you would want your car nearby.

And wow, what an international bunch of people it attracts. Did you think you needed to go to a big metropolitan center to hear a panoply of languages? Why no! Come to this orchard! The first family we ran into were exclaiming over the unripe fruit of a particular tree.

"I've never seen this fruit in America!" said a man.

"What is it?" I asked.

"I don't know what it's called in English, but in Turkish we call it [word I don't remember] which is something like 'sour apricot'"

He turned and started talking to another man in Turkish.

Like us, this family was trying to get to cherry trees that hadn't been picked over. Eventually we hit the jackpot. "Dad!" a kid in their family called. "This tree has two thousand cherries!!"

Some of the trees were so loaded with cherries that branches were weighed down to the ground.

Here are some of those two thousand cherries:





On our way to the blueberries, we could hear families speaking in some Southeast Asian language, and when I was crouched down picking, I could hear a guy from Israel (probably? from some of the things he referenced) talking to a woman about the history of the YMCA. "I want to write about the transition from empire to [unintelligible] through the YMCA."

Here are some blueberries and milkweed.



I heard a girl exclaim, "This one is as big as my thumb!"

While we were picking blueberries a handsome young guy with a Jamaican accent tried to interest us in a cruise on a yacht. Since mallorys_camera and I are, shall we say, of an age that makes us unlikely partners for handsome young guys with Jamaican accents ("Speak for yourself!" says MC from off stage), I suspect he was looking for generous patronesses, which is hilarious, but that accent is beautiful, and I enjoyed the flirtation all the same.

As we headed back to our cars we passed some Polish speakers, and also a South Asian mom using an umbrella to shelter her child, who was sleeping in a stroller, from the sun (there was actually sun that day--but then it did rain, of course: practically every day this month it's rained at least a little and more often than not spectacularly).

Before paying for our haul, we decided to have some lavender ice cream (marvelous!). The wall carries lists of plates of cars caught stealing as a warning not to try similar:



They, too, are not playing: they search your car when you go to pay. They opened my overnight bag that had my previous-day's clothes in it.

paying, and car search


While we were eating ice cream, I saw these two. The woman's skirt was full and flouncy, and then she popped that hat on her head and looked straight out of a brochure for Bolivia or Peru.



It was a wonderful experience--super company, beautiful outdoor activity, and great people watching/listening.

This past Friday was Food Truck Friday in my town.



So many marvelous choices! (This is just a sampling)



I got empanadas from La Mesa and some fried plantains from a Caribbean truck (not pictured). People were picnicking, but I was bringing my goodies home for family.

I did, however, stop to get a "wicked short" poem from Attack Bear Press's poetry vending machine:



I got an untitled haiku by Melissa Silva:
sun-shade dappled path--
beeeee-bzzz-see-seee-seee-dz-dsee
Blue Winged Warbler sings

Jason Montgomery, the Attack Bear in the picture of the vending machine, told me that on the trees at the front of the school grounds where Food Truck Friday was happening had the transcribed story of his grandmother's migration to the United States from Mexico in the early 20th century. Her story was vivid--here is the introductory placard and a few others from the trees:









It was very pleasant! Much better than my other main excitement of the week, which was to contract a TERRIBLE case of poison ivy for which I'm now on steroids ....

First, let me tell you what the parking lot at the supermarket was like, around 5:45 pm, on my way home. There was a smell of cinnamon, maybe from someone's discarded gum, and the sun was at the edge of a tide of rain-colored clouds, and there were goldfinches somewhere nearby--you couldn't see them, but you could hear them.

Now let me show you what the sky was like closer to home, about an hour later.

Things hanging from a line: it could be grape vines encumbering utility lines...



... or, this morning, it could be laundry. I like my new line-lifting pole (a fallen tree bough), it's like a mast.



Yesterday, our neighbor across the street was celebrating her daughter's college graduation. THIS GIANT RED BIG-RIG CAB was bringing all the boys to the yard. Literally.



Out back that same evening, ferns were green flames in the deep shade. I love ferns; they were my wings in childhood.

At night the katydids have taken up their song, and in the day there are cicadas. Let me tiptoe past an observation about the waning of the summer...

About those cicadas. Their sheeny noise, especially on a humid day like today, gives me an impression that they're burnishing the air the way potters can burnish bowls or weavers can burnish cloth. The air on humid days is like finest shining mist curtains, and the cicadas polish it with their song.

I missed my chance this summer to take a Spanish course through the local university's continuing ed program, so I'm trying to learn some on Duolingo. I mentioned this to one of my students at the jail, whose first language is Spanish, and yesterday she took it upon herself to teach me some things. I loved it. She taught me una sonrisa hermosa / a beautiful smile

What a beautiful word sonrisa is! So I was practicing some sentences, and the head of programs came in to fix our clock, and I got hugely embarrassed and said, "I promise I'm not exploiting my students to learn Spanish! We are doing essay work too!" (<--admitting the thing I feel guilty about), but she is so wonderful and cool that she just said, "I think it's wonderful. You go ahead."

... We did do some essay stuff too, though: honest.

On the way to the supermarket and back I saw three creatures.

First was a northern leopard frog, sitting at the edge of the sidewalk, in meditative contemplation, staring at the grass.

Here is a photo of a northern leopard frog from the Internet (source). Like my leopard frog, he is staring to the left.



He looked like Bodhidharma, who meditated so deeply he lost his arms and legs.

Bodhidharma (source)



Only, my frog's arms and legs were still intact, and the fingers of his hands were pointing inward, like he was getting ready to make a sitting bow.

I kept walking and later I heard a noise like a cat hissing or like a red-tailed hawk screaming--but very quietly (khhhhhaaaaaa!), and there was a rustling in the grass. I looked, and a garter snake slithered away. I hadn't known they could make such a noise!

On the way back, the snake was long gone, but the frog was still there, still doing zazen. I didn't have a camera, so I crouched down to sketch him, but I only managed his hands before he decided he'd had enough and took one big leap into the green.

A little farther on, I ran into a rabbit--who also took a leap into the green, flashing its tail as it went. What a lot of wildlife for a very short walk.

Message in a Bottle

Today's message in a bottle came in three languages: English, Mandarin, and Spanish, and additionally contained a UBS stick on which was a music video promoting a 2002 French film--it was dropped from a container ship somewhere between Hawaii and Vancouver and was found by a marine researcher--on the very day she'd been talking about messages in bottles--bobbing off the shores of Vancouver. The complete story is here, and I added it to the messages-in-bottles page on the Pen Pal website. (There's a pretty good collection there now!)

Milkweed Fibers

I haven't gotten much further in trying to process the long fibers of milkweed, but some of the bits that had broken off I left on my porch, where they were rained on, and the rain washed away more of the chaff, and what was left was shiny white like the hair of the thistledown man in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Alas, this photo doesn't get how glowy shiny it looks:



A poet: Ijeoma Umebinyuo

In addition to sharing poems on her tumblr--powerful poems and lovely poems, harsh poems and honey poems--she also shares thoughts, memories, essays.

"Stay, you are beginning to glow"

"Excuse me, but you cannot have 'Ijeoma' as her baptismal name" --a poem about cultural imperialism, when even names in your own tongue are denied you.

You can check out more of her writing here

. . . And maybe you would like to know how August is doing? August is doing like this...

. . . and this

Solstice bells were ringing when I stepped out this morning--



Everything was glowing





Across the way and elsewhere, rosa multiflora was in all its glory, bullying in its beauty--"you can't resist me; you know you can't. You love me--so don't complain about my thorns and the blood and pain. Remember this."



( Read more... )

Happy summer solstice from the northern hemisphere!