Asakiyume mita

Wakanomori and I went walking with a friend at the Quabbin Reservoir, and we came to a little pool that was alive with frogs, swimming around in the melting water above the ice still covering the pool. Amazing! Aren't they cold blooded? But they didn't seem to mind the icewater--they swam powerful breaststrokes this way and that in the three inches of water above the ice.

Wakanomori took this video. You have to turn the sound up very high in order to hear them, probably. Unfortunately, no closeups of the athletic swimmers, but imagine them with long thin arms and legs and graceful webbed feet and hands, swimming here and there, and singing.

The new green grass is rising up, like those dragon’s teeth soldiers, spearpoints first:



If the grass is the victor, what is the vanquished?
Easy: last year’s jack o’lantern:



I set it at the edge of the swamp, left it to stare into the swamp, after Halloween was over. And now only its outermost skin remains; it’s reduced from three dimensions to almost two--from sphere to circle. The blue thing is the candle stump, and to the right of that is the remainder of the woody chunk of stem that you use to lift the jack o’lantern lid up.

So, sometimes it seems like a battle, but other times it seems like there’s an alliance between decay and new growth. Behold the alliance fortress: