Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 134

magical bird

The healing angel and I went walking in the hemlock-and-beech-tree gorge of Holland Glen, whose river was extra full and rushing from rain the night before. There were tiny rivulets everywhere, water dripping from moss on rocks.

I darkened my eyebrows with some charcoal from someone's fire, and wet my lips with the water dripping from the moss. Then, a little way in, as we stood looking at the massive rock on the other side of the glen, came a loud and complicated warble of birdsong, from up,...

Update on Irom Sharmila and India's elections

India's having its general election now. It's a long process: voting began on April 7, and it will continue until May 12, with results announced on 16th. In the state of Manipur, Irom Sharmila expressed a desire to vote, but wasn't allowed to. One news source said that this was per a 1951 law that forbids any person in jail from voting,1 while another implied that it would have been possible, saying that seventeen of the thousand-plus prisoners in Manipur did vote--but Sharmila was not among...

Breather: rain and fiery sauces and reedy voices

When it rains, the paths in the woods turn into little streams:



I was walking that path in the early morning--the early morning light is very golden. In the picture below, you can't tell the season. Is it fall? Is it spring? It's a golden time.



Meanwhile, at home, I created something fiery--homemade sriracha sauce, following directions desperance gave in comments to this entry.

It is delicious! (Desperance, I only made half a recipe, which is why my results are so small. I have the paste, as wel...

I promise it won't be all Grapes of Wrath all the time

But. These two parts. First, another from Muley.


“What'd they get so their ‘margin a profit’ was safe? They got Pa dyin’ on the groun’, and Joe yellin’ his first breath, an’ me jerkin’ like a billy goat under a bush in the night. What’d they get? God knows the lan’ ain’t no good. Nobody been able to make a crop for years. But them sons-a-bitches at their desks, they jus’ chopped folks in two for their margin a profit. They jus’ cut ’em in two. Place where folks live is them folks. They ain’t...

Words like music

I was saying to rachelmanija that the way conversation flows in The Grapes of Wrath is like music. Muley, a guy who's been kicked off his land, says this:

"Well, sir, it's a funny thing. Somepin went an happened to me when they tol' me I had to get off the place. Fust I was gonna go in an kill a whole flock a people. Then all my folks all went away out west. And I got wanderin' aroun'. Jus' walkin' aroun'. Never went far. Slep' wherever I was. I was gonna sleep here tonight. That's why I come....

surely there's a lesson in it

loquats
My friend 88greenthumb gave me some loquat seeds, and I planted them in some compost-just-recently turned into soil.

All sorts of things sprouted. A tomato, for one thing. At last what I thought were the loquats started to come up, but also, some really intense and vigorous weeds, that I suspected were, oh, maybe raspberries. These kept *persisting* even though I pulled them out.

Eventually I checked to see what loquat seedlings looked like. The things I'd thought were loquat seedlings w...

"I acted on it"

Sherwood Smith had a fun review over on Goodreads of one of Patrick O'Brian's seafaring tales (The Surgeon's Mate, in case you're curious--full review here), and in it she featured this snippet of conversation, from when the characters talk about Hamlet's grave while their ship is being fired upon from Elsinore:

"So there he lies," said Jack, his telescope leveled. "Well, well: we must all come to it. But it was a capital piece, capital. I never laughed so much in my life."

"A capital piece ind...

travel back in time with me (just a few days)

Today it's raining in sometimes fine and sometimes coarse curtains of raindrops, and there's a lot of it--roadways are reconfiguring into waterscapes. But on Saturday it was sunny, and the high school girls' lacrosse team was having a car wash behind the town hall, to raise money.

Car washes are a fundraiser that really lends itself to the boisterous collegiality of a sports team. The girls were enjoying themselves. Orange and black are the school's colors, so it makes sense that the team is c...

Talking with Flo about cooking, Youtube, and self-publishing

On Friday I enthused about the popular Youtube channel All Nigerian Recipes and its charismatic creator, Flo Madubike. Today I have my questions for Flo, along with her answers.



First, though, let me tell you a little about her. She's from Nigeria (surprise!) and is married with two young children, a son and daughter. She's also a world traveler, because of her day job. And what might that be? Well, after taking a degree in engineering from the University of Nigeria at Nsukka, she now works a...

Recipes, the Internet, and friendship

One of my earliest memories of Internet goodness is of searching for a recipe for wild mushrooms--this would have been sometime between 1998 and 2005--and finding one offered by a guy who identified his location as Turkish Kurdistan. We had a brief back and forth, and I thought, Now this place is personal to me. I know someone there. I know he used to pick wild thyme with his grandmother.

Fast forward to last summer. One of my best memories from Timor-Leste was of being served deep-fried plant...