Asakiyume mita

While cleaning out the shed this past weekend, I found a number of things that are no longer useful to our household. A lawn spreader, for instance. I used it once, to spread lime. Then I decided to leave the lawn to its own devices, and now I have thyme and clover and hawkweed and dandelion and plantain growing--along with various sorts of grasses--and contentedly watch the bees and butterflies all summer long.

Also two skateboards, a snowboard, a soccer ball, and a street hockey stick and puck. "We never used it for street hockey," the ninja girl reminisced, later. "It was always a weapon or a staff or something like that in the games we played."

I put these out on my front lawn with a sign saying "Mysterious items found in shed; help yourself" and went into the house to post them in the neighborhood facebook group. By the time I had done that and come back outside, the lawn spreader was already gone. Brilliant!

Some time later, in the evening, I came onto my porch to shuck some corn, heard voices out front, and lo and behold, there were four children out front, three girls--sisters--and a boy. The older two girls, maybe 11 and 9 years old, were each cradling a skateboard. The boy had the street hockey stick and puck. The youngest girl, maybe 6 or 7, was standing dejectedly in front of the snowboard and soccer ball.

"Oh hi!" said the oldest sister, when she saw me. "We can really take this stuff?"

"Yes, definitely," I said. "I appreciate it!"

"She's unhappy," said the middle sister, indicating the youngest one. "Because she wanted the street hockey stick, but Noah took it."

"I love street hockey!" said Noah fervently.

"Do you have another one in your shed?" asked the middle sister.

"I'm afraid not--that's all the stuff I have," I said. "I don't suppose she'd like a soccer ball? I guess probably everyone has a soccer ball, huh."

"Well. Not everyone," said the oldest sister.

"What if you share it?" said Middle to Youngest. And then, to Noah, "Next time you come, you could trade off with her." From which I gleaned that Noah is visiting.

Somehow they sorted things out to Noah and Youngest's satisfaction.

"Please take the soccer ball too!" I begged. "All this stuff was my kids'.** I'm not going to be playing soccer."

"What grade are your kids in?" asked Middle.

"Oh, they're all grown up." I said. Oldest and Middle nodded. Of course, of course. That explained everything!

Youngest generously deigned to take the soccer ball, which left only the snowboard. You can't really expect to move a snowboard in August! Today I took it to the take-and-leave hut at the town transfer station.


**Actually, one of the skateboards was mine, but I don't plan on skateboarding in the future.

When started my Livejournal in 2006, I asked the ninja girl--at that time 16 years old--to make me an icon. "Draw me as a wanderer with a little gray in her hair," I said. She created this picture:



Not only have I used that as my default icon for 16 years now, but I've used it on other sites, too--so much so that I really think of it as me.

Today I received this mother's day portrait from Little Springtime--who is currently 29 (she was 13 back in 2006). She did it on a form they had at the local convenience store for kids to do portraits of their mothers--you can see she's given her age at the bottom right. When I got this, I at first thought it was manga art from a magazine. And then I realized it was my icon! I love it.

I will joyously post if my cat comes home, so in the meantime ...

Well, here is something I loved on Twitter: Answer the question (link takes you to a one-minute TikTok video on Twitter).

I love this guy generally; his little videos are always hilarious, and the interactions between the two characters are so perfect, and oh the question!

So ... WHAT WOULD YOU BE?

On Twitter I said "I think I'd like to be as heroic, beautiful, and liminal as a red mangrove" --to which one of my Twitter friends replied that he'd like to be a black mangrove because those are the ones that have pneumatophores, the little breathing tube sticking up like straws from the sand.

--Bonus points if you noticed, as the ninja girl did, that the music playing in the background of the video is from Spirited Away.

In August I went to the wedding of a dear friend, someone who's like a daughter to me--a treasured part of my family. She was the tall one's first girlfriend (if you look for a tall teenager with a much shorter teenager in this slideshow from more than a decade ago--that shorter teenager is her).

As it happens, the person she married is a woman (a wonderful woman who seems like an *excellent* life partner). In the marriage ceremony, the couple expressed gratitude to those who had come before them, whose courage and activism made it possible for them to be legally wed. The wedding banquet celebrated some of those people, as well as others who are important to the couple. It was a mini education for me:





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Here's lovely evening light streaming into the banquet pavilion, and you can see one of the informational plaques to the right of the mason jar:



Everything about the wedding was beautiful, including the wind that rose up as they said their vows and the seagulls that perched on the roof ridge of the pavilion, a flock of guardian spirits.

The wedding took place in Ithaca, NY, a city that seems blessed with street art. Here is a trompe l'oeil mural whose archway beacons the viewer toward a verdant future--my wish for this couple.

Some time ago I posted about creating a matching game with quotes from Warriors of the Wind, a mangled dubbing of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind which we have an affection for in my family. I didn't have it quite done for New Year's, and then it became hard to find a time when the whole family was gathered, but tonight, on the occasion of a family birthday, we all gathered and played. True, the healing angel was ill (he's been sick with a virus now for more than 10 days...), and the ninja girl had to play with us via Facetime from Japan, but we did it! All six of us played, and everyone laughed and had fun. Even the cat got in on the game, temporarily sprawling himself on the pile of matches and then watching with big eyes as we grabbed the cards and shouted out the lines.

Well, removing the one shopping cart must have registered as a gauntlet thrown down, because a new one appeared, and this time in the rosa multiflora, which will KILL YOU if you try to go through it--which meant, no lifting from underneath.

But today, I had three of the four forest creatures to help me, and they are grown into their power! We got that cart out in no time.

pondering the shopping cart


hands and hooks


lifting


up over the rail


success!


I'm a little worried about the cart tossers upping the ante... what if they dump two shopping carts? But sufficient unto the day...

Behind this grand old mill building is the Mill River, which teenybuffalo took me to several years ago.



Little Springtime, the healing angel, and I went down to the very spot she had shown me (and, actually, the healing angel was along on that trip too), but really what we wanted to get to was a sandy island a bit upstream. The problem was that there was a waterfall between us and upriver at this point.

The healing angel hopped quite nimbly across the river and signaled to us, after a time, that we would find a place to scramble down on our side if we walked back along the highway a bit.

We walked back up the highway, and sure enough, did find a place to scramble down to the water.

Here is the healing angel, already on the island we want to get to.


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On Christmas Eve, there were messages written in a loose, accomplished hand in the ice. I can't read them, but the Snow Queen's Kay could--he was studying that language, I hear.





Some days later, Little Springtime had a college interview with an alumna of the institution in question who happens to live locally. They met in a coffee shop. The ninja girl and I tagged along. I edited and she doodled, but then I finished my editing, so I doodled too. She doodled a Medusa and remarked that snakes for hair wouldn't necessarily be ugly--just rather alarming. I wondered how other things for hair might be. Birds, for instance, or knives. Later I thought, what about dogs' heads? (or wolves or foxes. canids.) Here are those alternative medusae (with one inexplicable fish head in among the canids in the third second):

Yesterday I took the ninja girl to the bus station, and noticed the people there. This evening I went to pick her up, accompanied by the tall one and the healing angel.

This evening at the bus station there was a crazy person--older man, tall and lanky, with one milky-white blind eye, standing in the center of all the seats, speaking at random. “Shall I invite you to the wedding?” he said to one person. The tall one and I assiduously ignored him, heads bent over books. The healing angel was ignoring him too, concentrating (he told me later) on some missing tiling on the floor that looked like the Norse letter D.

The crazy man passed by us on the way to the bathroom, looked at the healing angel, and said, “You’re twelve, aren’t you.” And since the healing angel is twelve, he said, “Yes, I am.” And then the man said, “You know the scripture passage--‘Why were you searching for me? Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?’ Do you have the keys to the house yet? ....First the house keys, and then when you get to be a little older, the keys to the car!” And then he went into the bathroom.

It was a kind of stunning experience.

Little Springtime was disappointed she didn't get to come along... if I had known it would be such an adventure, I would surely have taken you, Little Springtime!