Asakiyume mita

Yesterday mallorys_camera and I went for a walk in a location more or less equidistant between the two of us (more or less... it was closer to me, though). After a couple of false starts that included infiltrating the high school bathrooms during a soccer tournament (we blended right in: "How's Dustin enjoying soccer, Sandy?" she asked me. "Oh, he's loving it, Lisa. He'll be playing for Real Madrid one day, you just wait"), we found ourselves at the entrance to the Housatonic Flats Reserve.

The gate was shut but the fairies had left a garland--our invitation.



The area used to be a dumping grounds, but people cleaned it up, and in the last days of September, it has an ethereal beauty.



Here, old man's beard climbs skyward.



Sadly, the Housatonic River was poisoned for decades by General Electric, which dumped PCBs into it. North of this site, in the city of Pittsfield, remediation has been undertaken, but not yet for the town of Great Barrington, where this reserve is, though any day now... As a consequence, there is this sobering warning as you begin your walk:



"No coma" is Spanish: Don't Eat. But at first I saw it as English and was very confused. No coma? Sounds good to me! I don't want or intend to fall into a coma!

I am happy to report that we ate no frogs, fish, or turtles and fell into no comas. There was a tasty green feral apple, however.

This past week gave us plenty of cold days for frozen bubbles. I blew one beautiful big one that floated up past my neighbor's pussy willow tree and eventually snagged in the upper branches of my apple tree:



(The black blob in the sky is a crow)



Tangled up



One day I decided to walk a birthday card to the post office--to get there I chose a path along trails and through the woods. There were many animal tracks. This photo is from a different day, but it gives the sense of the busy traffic:



Eventually I emerged from the woods, patted my pocket, and--oh no! No birthday card! It had come out at some point! So I turned around and retraced my steps and retrieved it from beneath a pine tree. I mentioned this on Twitter, and the Healing Angel responded:

Meanwhile, a very lonely pine tree droops when it realises that this courier was not for it, and that it will have to wait still longer for the letter it anticipates

OMG blood of my blood, soul of my soul.

osprey_archer has talked about how we need to have more gradations in how we refer to people than just "acquaintance" and "friend" (and then piling on the adjectives to explain how close a friend the friend is, or how distant the acquaintance is). I'd like also a word for a person you don't even know at all, but who you see often and whose existence brings you joy--

--like this older woman I often see walking around the time I'm finishing up a morning run, or sometimes on weekends if I'm doing stuff in my front yard, she may walk by. Her face says her heritage is something East Asian, and there's some air about her that makes me think she's doesn't speak much English, if any. Maybe it's her clothes, which seem to come from elsewhere (I can't describe why I think this--I'd need to look more closely--but they're not what you see on American sixty- and seventy-year-old women) or maybe it's her hairstyle (and again, I'm not sure I can recall it precisely: maybe parted in the middle and pulled back in a bun?), or maybe it's that what we do when we see each other is smile and nod, or sometimes, if we're on opposite sides of the street, I'll wave, and she'll wave back. We've never spoken a word to each other. (For all I know, she thinks of *me* as a non-English speaker)

Today I have the care of my neighbor's dog, so just now I took him for a walk around a housing development that's going up across the way from my neighborhood. There's one paved loop, and then a dirt-and-gravel road leading to ongoing roadworks and other excavations, and on either side of that, piles of stone and discarded water pipes and wildflowers: right now, mainly queen anne's lace, St. John's wort, and black-eyed susans. I'd completed three quarters of the loop and had my back to the dirt-and-gravel road, and heard a sound, like a tune coming from a radio somewhere, like maybe some of the workmen had a radio on--but it's Sunday evening, and there are no workmen out.

I looked back, and I saw the woman sitting on something--maybe a concrete slab or a big rock--surrounded by wildflowers, some way down that dirt-and-gravel road, just sitting, enjoying the evening. And maybe singing? Maybe it was her. Or maybe it was someone else's radio, somewhere. Anyway, I waved; she waved.

It made me so happy. I'd like a word for a person like this. Special fellow-traveler in the non-Communist sense of the word.

I was wishing I could make a scent recording of the route from my home to the supermarket. You'd get the fresh, sweet-light scent of long grass, and then the cloying, overpowering scent of the Russian olives in bloom, and then a whiff of creosote, as I passed a telephone pole, and then the sharp, rich smell of the mulch heaped around the bushes by the supermarket.

If I took a sound recording on the same journey, then as I walked along the boardwalk through the marsh, you'd hear--without fail--a frantic robin fly up from under the boardwalk. She's made a nest down there, and every time I walk along the boardwalk, she flies away in a panic. I hope she doesn't have high blood pressure or PTSD by the time she's done incubating her eggs.

The thing is, she's actually quite safe from anyone or anything on the boardwalk--it would take some doing to get off the boardwalk, go underneath it, and find her nest.

. . . Today, though, I walked the other direction, in search of mugwort (found!). I didn't have my camera, but I did have my cell phone (very unusual for me to have my cell phone w/me, but today I did), so here is a cell phone photo of star-of-bethlehem wildflowers.