Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 105

a thousand thousand photos of the sun

I know I kind of promised some pictures of a mill--and it's a very pretty mill--but I have some other pictures I wanted to share, photos of the sun, so very many, taken with the temporary pinhole cameras formed by shifting leaves.

Look, here are tiny portraits of our nearby star:


And here:



And here:



The leaves and ground salute you, sun, and I do too. Thanks for shining.

The footprints of Noah's raven

My neck of the woods turns out to be one of the best places in the United States to see dinosaur footprints. Not bones, but footprints. Who knew?! But it's true. I've known for years that there was a rather idiosyncratic, privately run place nearby ("Nash Dinosaur Tracks") where one can see dinosaur tracks, but I'd never been. But this weekend, wakanomori and I went there, and it was fabulous.

The back entrance to Nash Dinosaur Tracks, which was the way we ended up entering





Kornell Nash, the cu...

Christian Lyons and the Five Foxes

Last night, late, I heard this story on the CBC: the tale of Christian Lyons, a lawyer in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, who noticed, as he took a shortcut home through the woods behind the local high school, that there were a number of foxes about. He saw five. And then...

Lyons waited for them to cross the path and carry on through the woods. They did, and he carried on his way.

"Lo and behold, as I came over a ridge, I saw that these, at least five foxes, had circled back and were back...

People

I wanted to tell you about some people I saw here and there.

Sisters
There were two little girls I saw in a Dunkin Donuts. They were very, very little--both of them, if they stood next to me, wouldn't have come up to my hip. They both had long black hair that went down their back. They were sisters: one was wearing a three-tiered ruffle skirt with a stars-and-stripes pattern, and the other was wearing an Elsa T-shirt. They loved everything in the Dunkin Donuts--the ATM, the gift cards, the cou...

rescuing a shopping cart

I feel very proprietary about the boardwalk near our house because I helped it get built (in a roundabout way--I didn't actually help build it). So, when someone leaves a crumpled-up can of soda or a Dunkin Donuts coolatta cup on it, I pick those things up, and I try to keep the marsh it goes through clear of rubbish, too. I love the marsh even more than the boardwalk.

When I saw some mischief makers had managed to push a shopping cart over the boardwalk rails and into the long grass in the ma...

who tried to bring this in here?

Some people have the gift of telling dreams so that, instead of a confusing mish-mash of incomprehensible (often even to them) signifiers, you instead get a well-turned, strange tale. sovay , for instance, can do this.

And so can Little Springtime--at least, she just did:

I dreamed we drove to Russia, and there were bears everywhere. We got to a train station, and there were bears there, too, and I said, "I'm sure glad we didn't bike." And then the customs people stopped us and one of them held...

sneezes, locks, transformations, averted explosions

But first, something bejeweled and beautiful:


At a traffic light, a truck gave a series of little sneezes. It sounded like my cat when he sneezes, but I think it had to do with some sort of hydraulic system.

I think all combination locks that I've had have included the number 36. Based on this scant, and possibly misremembered, evidence, I've come to the conclusion that all combination locks--at least the portable sort, like the ones that come at the end of cheap cable bicycle locks--include t...

vegetable stand

I picked up some corn just now. yesterday (I started preparing to post this entry yesterday, but it got delayed).


I chose it from the pile in the kids' wading pool.


I also got some kale


He sold them to me. My neighbor knows him; she used to work for him. He has a whole farm in another town; this is a satellite farmstand.

another walk

On the way to the supermarket and back I saw three creatures.

First was a northern leopard frog, sitting at the edge of the sidewalk, in meditative contemplation, staring at the grass.

Here is a photo of a northern leopard frog from the Internet (source). Like my leopard frog, he is staring to the left.



He looked like Bodhidharma, who meditated so deeply he lost his arms and legs.

Bodhidharma (source)



Only, my frog's arms and legs were still intact, and the fingers of his hands were pointing inwar...

This morning

This morning it's a planet full of atmospheres. Birds are rising and falling in the long grass and others are declaiming from high up in the trees, and some are swimming in the gauzy sky.