Asakiyume mita

I finished Rebecca Fraimow's Lady Eve's Last Con, which was rollicking good fun from cover to cover. A couple more quotes (nonspoilery) from further on in the story:

"I’d given her plenty of time to put me back in my place; she’d be faster on the draw next time around. It’s a bad habit to let yourself get caught tongue-tied. Life’s too short for should-have-saids." (51% in)

"I stuck my chin up, and tried to look like a person who was trying to look brave." (91% in)

I got one hilarious surprise, which was that one firm prediction I'd had since the very beginning ... didn't come true. All along I'd been congratulating Rebecca on treading a very difficult line to just about allow it to be possible--and then it didn't happen. I was so sure of my prediction that I had a hard time believing the evidence on the page, and then when I'd absorbed the fact, it threw what I'd seen as delicate treading into a whole other light (of the "No, actually it's quite simple: the obvious judgment is the correct one" variety). The way the story played out in reality makes for more satisfying storytelling, I think, and allows for more nuance and growth for one character, so I was pleased with it. It just took a moment of mental rearranging for me to get there (and I was retroactively a little ashamed of my prediction).

My morning morsel of Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass brought a reflection on strawberries:

In a way, I was raised by strawberries, fields of them. Not to exclude the maples, hemlocks, white pines, goldenrod, asters, violets, and mosses of upstate New York, but it was the wild strawberries, beneath dewy leaves on an almost-summer morning, who gave me my sense of the world, my place in it.

I grew up in upstate New York too. For me it was the black raspberries of early July. Being with them was my everything.

Robin Wall Kimmerer went on to talk about how the nature of a thing can change depending on how it comes to us:

It's funny how the nature of an object--let's say a strawberry or a pair of socks--is so changed by the way it has come into your hands, as a gift or as a commodity. The pair of wool socks that I buy at the store ... I might feel grateful for the sheep that made the wool and the worker who ran the knitting machine ... But I have no inherent obligation to those socks as a commodity, as private property ... But what if those very same socks ... were knitted by my grandmother and given to me as a gift? That changes everything. A gift creates ongoing relationship. I will write a thank-you note. I will take good care of them and if I am a very gracious grandchild I'll wear them when she visits even if I don't like them. When it's her birthday, I will surely make her a gift in return ... Wild strawberries fit the definition of gift, but grocery store berries do not.

Continuing to work my way through Why Didn't You Just Leave, edited by Julia Rios and Nadia Bulkin. As usual with an anthology, some stories strike my fancy more than others.

Today I didn't have to go to work, so I picked red currants. My bushes are full, bowed down.

branch bowed down


underneath


And the berries glow.


There was life everywhere all around while I was picking--tiny life, little spiders, a daddy longlegs, tiny caterpillars, mother mosquitoes hoping I had a meal for them, and also bigger life, orioles singing up high in trees, invisible, and robins and bluejays, and next door, the neighbors' grandkids, splashing in a pool, and under my feet and knees as I alternately squat and kneel, there's soft green moss, and it's so gloriously, softly hot--heat woven on moisture and full of scents--the grass, the flowers, the dirt, my shampoo, my deodorant, a whiff of the laundry detergent--the humid heat holds these scents. (It's the time of year that edible chestnuts are in bloom--oh the scent of those as you pass them). I never, ever feel more alive or happy than on a summer day like this, life pressing against me. Each moment is bliss.

... Here is the same branch, no longer bowed down.



And here are the pickings from just this one bush:



This will become red currant jelly. The berries on the two other bushes may be just for eating out of hand and for things like fruit in scones. We'll see.

I had some Canadian pennies that, technically, I shouldn't try to use here. (Actually, I'm sure no one cares much. In addition to Canadian pennies, I've got English half-penny coins and euro penny coins that I've gotten in change.) So, I decided to flatten them on the train tracks this past Tuesday. (Don't worry: there are no known cases of pennies on the tracks derailing trains.) At 4:10 pm, I heard the train whistle, so I went out with the healing angel to see if I could collect my flattened coins.

I only recovered one:

One for the tracks
One for the train
That left one
That still remained

It was extra shiny in a thin circle all around the edge: like the bright sliver of new moon that cradles the old moon--which I saw later that night, with clouds racing by it.



Since my sister and I often made necklaces of cranberries as kids--theoretically to drape on the turkey as it was cooking for Thanksgiving, but really we'd end up wearing them ourselves--I think of cranberries as being beads. Beautiful bright red beads that, nevertheless, you can cook with.

Mama, why are you unstringing your necklace?
Don't ask questions, child
But why are you adding them to the soup?
Didn't I just say not to ask questions? Now bring this cup of tea to our guest.
Mama, are you going to serve him soup with your beads in it?
Take the man his tea!
I am, but I just--
Now!

What monster is it that is tearing the wings off luna moths, hereabouts?

Anyway, this morning I set out to do some guardrail balancing--I figured 7:30 on a Sunday morning would mean no one was about, but maybe it's because it's the Fourth of July weekend, but there were too many cars. I only did a little balancing.

I kept walking, though, and found this luna wing.



I'm wearing a shirt with a pocket, so I put it in my pocket--and it turned out to be a passport to the land of black raspberries. So many, and I hadn't come with anything to put them in--so I folded a grape leaf in half and stitched it with some grass, and voila, a carrying pouch.



Mmmm, berries.

For lunch today, I ate things I found: a mushroom, raspberries, and chestnuts



How about these lines from the song "Gravedigger," by Dave Matthews, which seajules introduced me to?

Gravedigger, when you dig my grave
Won't you make it shallow
So that I can feel the rain

The dead are thirsty.

When the dead walk among the living, the sun shines through clouds of ghost passenger pigeons as through smoky glass.