Asakiyume mita

Little Springtime was cleaning out her room and decided she probably didn't need her collection of bottle caps anymore.

I, however, still need her collection of bottle caps. Bottle caps are so wonderful. I want to make something with them. One day. For now, I just want to admire them.







Using the Em icon because Em's little sister Tammy collects bottle caps.

On September 9, Em imagines sea hummingbirds for her sister Tammy:

Maybe you can start a whole new genealogy. The sea hummingbirds, who have scales instead of feathers, and both lungs and gills

Here is a sea hummingbird:



And--unrelated to this day in Pen Pal-- some time ago I also promised a picture of a bee shark for Benjanun Sriduangkaew, @bees_ja on Twitter:

If you live in Mermaid's Hands, sometimes you walk to the mainland across the mudflats, sometimes you take a dinghy, and sometimes you wade. On September 3, Em and her sister waded:

The water was not quite knee high as we waded over. We had our shoes tied together by their laces and slung around our necks so we didn’t have to try to fit them in our backpacks.

In some communities in the Philippines, kids weren't so lucky as to have dinghies for the days when the tide was high--they would swim-walk a half-mile of open water to get to school, with their books wrapped in plastic and balanced on their head:


Source: Peter Shadbolt, "Yellow boats bring hope and education in the Philippines where the school run can be a swim," CNN, May 20, 2014.

When a Filipino blogger found out about the situation, he established a foundation that provides schoolboats. Now the kids can go by boat to school:



Here, meanwhile, are Em and Tammy, setting out for school. The houses of the kids in the Philippines were on stilts; Em and Tammy's house sits on a raft.



I realize Tammy in this picture looks rather like Em in the icon, whereas Em looks different from how I've drawn her in the past--because her hair is different in this picture ... and because I have very limited ability to make a person recognizably the same from picture to picture if I change cues like hair. (Also, Em in the icon is by Kelsey Soderstrom, a professional artist, whereas I'm a rank amateur.)

On July 3, Kaya's pet crow Sumi brought her Em's message in a bottle, and on July 4, she wrote to her mother about the experience--and she wrote back to Em.

Here is what she wrote her mother. She was staring into the fires of the Ruby Lake, and then. . .

I couldn’t keep looking at it for long, though. It’s too bright. It paints itself permanently on your eyes, the way the sun will if you stare at it. I closed my eyes and saw black spots where the lava had been especially bright, and when I opened them, one black spot remained, seeming to rise right out of the lava.

It was Sumi . . . But for all that Sumi seemed to be to flying up from the depths of the Ruby Lake, she must actually have been returning from a trip to the coast, because she brought me a present from the sea.

And below the cut is her letter to Em.

( from Kaya to Em )