Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 109

late afternoon picnic

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, th...

Books and stories

So much time has slipped by between when I said I wanted to talk about books and now, and in the meantime, other books have also arrived, plus other reading matter--I feel like Little Springtime, who has an LJ tag, "Oh LJ I have so much to tell you!"

What I want to do is give you some tastes of books I'm reading or have read recently. This entry is way more text than anyone wants to see in their friends feed, so I've put the quotes and discussion under cuts. You can choose which ones you want...

How many years in the future is your story set?

The novel that I'm inching forward on (more like millimetering forward on) is set in the future, and that's got me thinking about what does and doesn't change in the future, or, to put it another way, how far in the future you'd have to go before something had disappeared or was forgotten entirely. Tech is easy to lose--it can be lost in 20 years, if it's replaced by other things. (This may not seem like a loss, but it is: the skill to use anything is still a skill, even if it's an obsolete s...

seen on a bulletin board

I love the tattoos on both the barber and his client:

the bandit Giuliano

wakanomori and I are at my father's house tonight, just to make sure he's doing all right, and to bring over a spare computer that I can use if I need to be here again for any length of time.

My father is telling us stories of his youth, of traveling to Italy after World War II, when he was a young man. He was visiting his grandmother in Palermo, and he recalls that they had to put two iron bars across the doors at night because there was a bandit, Giuliano, who was robbing from the rich and g...

yellow

My friend dudeshoes was asking if the color of spring is pink or purple (here is her sampling of purple).

I think maybe yellow needs to be a contender?

mustard, celandine, dandelions


We had dandelion greens for dinner the other night, fresh picked. They were bitter, but it was a good bitter.

ETA: Yellow, day two. Don't let anyone tell you that dandelions don't last if you pick them. They close up at night but reopen in the morning. Also, I picked more dandelions greens.



I want to share about book...

Beautiful May

Here is a road I walk every day. This photo is from yesterday, but this morning, when I passed this way, an oriole flew into an apple tree (not visible in this picture) and seemed to be sniffing the blossoms. Maybe it was sipping nectar. Maybe it was nibbling the petals. Maybe it was listening to whispered secrets--I don't know.



These are not the apple blossoms that the oriole was getting intimate with, but these are apple blossoms I especially love, because they're on a tree I grew from a see...

Jiji, demon hunter?

(I'm back home now. Slowly I'm working through my friends list backlog, but I probably won't make it all the way back to all the entries I've missed--I'm sure glad to be back with you all though.)

I have a creepy little story to tell you about my first night home. We were talking at dinner about the cats that come calling for our handsome Jiji. The healing angel was saying that one night he heard a sound like babies crying, right outside the house, but he knew babies couldn't be crying right o...

off line

I'm taking care of my dad right now (nothing too serious) and have access to the interwebs about twice a day for 15 minutes, so alas, not on LJ (or Twitter or Tumblr or FB) right now.

Be back soon (I hope)--everybody stay well in the meantime!

Not One of Us, issue 53

This issue of Not One of Us has stories and poetry by people whose work I love, and I'm looking forward to savoring each piece. As it happens, my eyes first fell on a lovely poem by sovay for rose_lemberg called "Day, Sun, Night." It starts like this:

I worte this poem on a feather
and sent it by post of the sun

So lovely!

And this description:

Her hair a chime of coins and ancient gold

What's great about the poem (and it's short--I've just quoted you almost a third of it) is how, while remaining e...