Asakiyume mita

This is the net to catch a falling sky. it has tears but is still strong.



Below the cut are some boxcar signatures. Even graffiti artists can want to own their accomplishments.

( Lords and Tavo Alrak )

And here is something golden from a marsh--a marsh marigold, in fact

Went on a bike ride with Waka in the sensual hot 'n' humid, where you really feel each patch of shade, like you're diving into cold water, and then into the heat again, and in all these places, so many smells--the smell of baking soil, of flowers and black raspberries and pine needles, also the smell of creosote by the train tracks, and the smell of swampy still water, and here and there the smell of garbage cooking in the sun.

We passed a father having a picnic with his daughter out the shaded door to their ground-floor apartment. There was a blanket: dad was sitting on this, very still--I thought he was meditating at first--and there were many small bowls of things to eat. On the threshold of the door was the daughter, three or four, with wild curly reddish brown hair, not quite ready maybe to be lured out.

This dramatic wildflower turns out to be butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa). How pretty!



And on the trip, there was some underpass art...





The other side was a celebration of bees and beekeeping:



Also on the ride, a trailside water tap, where you could get a drink of water, and air pump, in case your tires were low, courtesy of a car dealer; also a scrapyard with the cars almost lost in wildflowers and tall grass.

Song sparrows, catbirds, and swifts were all singing out. At the place we stopped to buy a drink and a bite to eat, the woman behind the counter had a tattoo of utility polls and the swooping wires strung between them, with birds on them.

I discovered this freaky Queen Anne's lace blossom growing beside a very-little-traveled road. It's the sort of thing that would be used in augury, a prophecy that can't bode well. As stillnotbored remarked, little-traveled roads are great places to dispose of inconvenient bodies. The blossom is proclaiming that the truth will out?



And here are my favorites, the foxtail grasses, golden macro-paramecia, playing in the sun.



ETA: Nope, not for real--see next entry. If only the spray painter knew how well their prank succeeded!

It's a bouquet of shades and textures. The old-man's-beard and the milkweed are so soft; the amaranth-like stuff is prickly, some of the others are scratchy.



Come closer

Sometime last week, I shared with osprey_archer this image of Fergus the Forager, in his suit made of burdock leaves:



(osprey_archer, someone asked him in comments how he made it, and he said he did it by glueing the leaves to a preexisting cloth suit--so it's not like those leaves had to hold up on their own!)

His whole entry on burdock is fascinating. I knew about burdock root as a food, because I prepared it all the time in Japan. My favorite recipe is kimpira gobo, which I'll share before this entry's done. But he has many other recipes, including candied burdock.

But most interesting to me is his photo of the Burry Man of Queensferry (photo comes from Wikipedia via Fergus's blog)



The Burry Man's suit is made of burrs! He makes his suit and walks a circuit of Queensferry, Scotland, on the second Friday in August. Here's what Fergus shared from Richard Mabey's Flora Britannica

At 9am the Burry Man emerges into Queensferry High Street, carrying two staves bedecked with flowers. He walks slowly and awkwardly with his arms outstretched sideways, carrying the two staves, and two attendants, one on each side, help him to keep his balance by also holding on to the staves. Led by a boy ringing a bell, the Burry Man and his supporters begin their nine-hour perambulation of South Queensferry.
The first stop is traditionally outside the Provost’s house, where the Burry Man receives a drink of whisky through a straw.

The perambulating and the drinking go on all day long, and around 6 pm, he returns to the town hall.

Fergus links to the Wikipedia article about the Burry Man, which includes information about making the suit from one guy who served as the Burry Man for twelve years. The entry also includes speculation about the origins and purposes of the ritual. I just like that it's part of something called the Ferry Fair, which I will now think of as the Fairy Fair, since, come on: this has Fairy Folk written all over it.

Here's a picture of the Burry Man from last year's Fairy Fair:


[Edit from 2018: some of the photos have disappeared in the intervening years...]

And here he is getting his tipple:

Source: 2013 Ferry Fair

Oh! And now that recipe, so this entry isn't entirely cribbing from other sources, or at least not other online sources:


That's cut out from a magazine from which I used to order stuff for delivery from a food coop I belonged with, with my neighbors when I lived in Japan. You got approximately 300 grams of gobo (burdock root) for 298 yen--about $3.00, at the time.

( translation of the recipe )

a path alongside dandelions



such dandelions!





Comments off because we've already been dandelion talking in the last entry; these are just for you to enjoy. Comments will be back next post.

Two gin and tonics, enriched and flavored by sweetfern (spicy, aromatic) and heal-all (can't discern its flavor,but it's in the mint family, and its name tells me it heals all!)

I practiced on a skateboard this morning. I still don't get it at all, but at least I see where and how I must get it. Lean to the left, lean to the right. Balance.

Goldfinches, hardly visible, but audible in the unrelenting blue sky. Sparrows. Mourning doves. Hawks. Also: things that rustle, invisibly, in the greenery. Snakes, chipmunks, squirrels, mice.

In bloom: yarrow, spotted knapweed, birdsfoot trefoil, black-eyed susans, meadowsweet, goatsbeard (mainly to seed), crown vetch, queen anne's lace, chicory, day lilies, purple clover, rabbit's foot clover, hop clover, butter-and-eggs (toadflax), purple toadflax, poke blossoms.

Could it be that the world is made of mathematics, and when we make music, we're reaching for those principles? Here is the number Tau (it's Pi x 2) played as music:

What if flowers faded to feathers and caught the frost in their old age?



Yesterday I played secretary at a meeting. As usual, I doodled..



Vi Hart has a new math doodling video, about the twelve days of Christmath. She points out that in the twelve-days-of-Christmas song, the gifts can be divided into three categories: birds (partridge, turtledoves, French hens, calling birds, geese, swans), humans (maids, ladies, lords, pipers, drummers), and an anomaly (golden rings). wakanomori says, "It makes you think it must all be about the anomaly."

Wakanomori found an anomaly in the town newspaper--a legal notice that shouts out "STORY!"

( To any unknown or unascertained heirs, successors, assigns, devisees, and/or legal representatives... )

There's more--about what the heirs, successors, assigns, etc. have to do to contest Ms. Keedy's claim--but I thought the part I just quoted was ... impressive. So Mr. Bronner died, leaving, apparently, no heirs, and Ms Keedy lived in his house for twenty years after that, and now, by virtue of that fact, she wants title to the property.

My questions are--what is a devisee? And how do you live both peaceably and notoriously in a place? And adversely? [ETA: never mind--I found the answers]

Last but not least, I got a calendar from Bread and Puppets. Each month is a woodblock print and a line from a hymn in the Sacred Harp. This month's line is, Lo, what a glorious sight appears. Glorious, like frosted feather flowers?

Mugwort was what I set out for, as I have become addicted to mugwort tea.

Exhibit One: Mugwort



It's taller than me, which is something I love in a wildflower or weed. ( It silhouettes nicely against the sky. )

But on my return, I found something wonderful by the side of the road: a book



It turns out to be King Spruce, by Holman Day. It was published in 1908.



Holman Day (1865-1935) was a Maine native, a journalist and newspaper publisher, and the author of twenty-three novels and three books of ballads. A scholarly article that wakanomori kindly procured for me dismisses the novels ("None of his publications, unfortunately, can be placed much above the level of the pot-boiler") but takes interest in the ballads. I think I'd like to find the ballads.

I think I'll try the book too, though. I opened at random and found this passage:

"And now, speaking of arresting in the name of the law," snarled the lumber baron, "and your duty that you seem so fond of, Rodlliff, get out your handcuffs for something that's worth while. It's three years in state-prison for maliciously setting fires on timber lands. It's a long vacation in the county jail for assaulting a man without provocation. There's the girl who set that fire; there's the man that struck me. So you see, Lane, your prisoner is going to have company."

Do you sense a villain?

white baneberry (Actaea pachypoda)

It's in the woods where I walk, and I tried twice to photograph it, so startling with its white berries on their purple-red stalks, but my pictures came out blurry. But here is what Google offers:





The plant is also called doll's eyes, for the berries' creepy resemblance to the same. Eyes--poisonous eyes--growing on a red stalk. Yes, the berries are the poisonous part. Wikipedia says, The berries contain cardiogenic toxins which can have an immediate sedative affect on human cardiac muscle tissue ... Ingestion of the berries can lead to cardiac arrest and death.

So don't eat them. Have an autumn raspberry instead.