Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 156

The king unwilling

I went to buy Little Springtime a new inner tube for her bike. The guy at the bike shop had a tattoo on his arm, a chickadee with fancy scrollwork around it, something like this, though at the time I couldn't quite make out the last word.



"What is your chickadee saying?" I asked.

"Oh, 'The king unwilling,'" said the guy. "It's the motto of my hometown."

"'The king unwilling' is the motto of your hometown? How cool! What's your hometown?"

"Danvers, Massachusetts."

At home, I looked up the motto. Wi...

Heavy feet, powerful hands

They made a new sidewalk near here; they made it of cement instead of tarmac, and a squirrel left its footprints in the corner of one square. It did this after the cement had set.

You're thinking I misremembered. Of course it had to have happened when the cement was still wet. Maybe, but I don't think so. I think maybe the squirrel had such deep concerns, such ponderous thoughts, that his feet left impressions, even in the fast-hardening cement. A weighty, metaphysical squirrel. Any hawk that...

gathering catalpa blossoms

Last night, when we went out to look at fireflies and the moon, the ninja girl found a new place for me to gather catalpa blossoms. In the night, white things look so bright in even the faintest light. They were ghostflowers in the grass.

This morning I went back and strung even more of them on long stalks of grass, and now they're hanging over the sink.

This is the spot the ninja girl found:



A scattering of blossoms becomes a carpet:



When they fall, they sometimes catch in the branches of other...

the moon and fireflies, wards

After working all day, tonight, when it was all soft and dark out, and the breeze felt pleasantly cool, the forest creatures and I went out to look at the fireflies, or the moon, or both.

It ended up being both--the fireflies spangling the fields on one side of the road, pure magic, and the moon the color of lemon custard and bright as a candle flame above the other.

--okay but here's what I've been thinking about. It's because of getting all these extra immunizations to go to East Timor. Immu...

lured elsewhere on the solstice

It started out simply enough, with the crown vetch and the tendrils...





But then came the elder blossoms, which aways lead to magic



And before I knew it, it was all rose petals and water and green light....







A good beginning to the longest day of the year, here in the Northern Hemisphere.

Jiji the biped, plus jeans

Jiji is the most upstanding cat I've ever known. He is always standing up on two feet to look at this or that.

what's outside?
(Wakanomori's picture)



The ninja girl, Little Springtime, and I all have jeans that look vaguely similar, so the other day I embroidered "Ate logu" on the back of one pair of mine, so I could them apart from the girls' ones. "Ate logu" means "See you later" in Tetun, but what it looks like is a misspelled version of Ate logo, which is Portuguese for the same thing. (Tetu...

The story of the girl whose pen pal was General Manuel Noriega

I've mentioned before that one thing I'd like to do on my eventual, but currently hypothetical, Pen Pal website is collect actual stories of actual pen pals. One true story that made a huge impression on me--and influenced the plot happenings of Pen Pal--is the story of Sarah York, who struck up a correspondence with Panamanian strong-man Manuel Noriega in the late 1980s, when Sarah was in fifth grade and Noriega had just been indicted on drug and racketeering charges by the US government.

Th...

line the path with portraits of our favorite star

The little gaps in the canopy of leaves act as pinhole cameras, so that the circles you see dappling the ground are each one portraits of the sun. It's why, when there's a partial eclipse, you get hundreds of bright crescents shining underfoot--faithful portraiture.

The leaves all love the sun. That's why they offer us these images for veneration.

[image error]

Image from Paul Traynor, "Bokeh: The Magic of Unfocussed Light and How to Exploit It," 15 July 2011.

A ghost bike

A ghost bike has appeared in Amherst:



It is spray-painted white all over . . .



wakanomori explained to me: ghost bikes are a memorial for when a bicyclist is killed by a motor vehicle. There is a website that tells a little more.

As it happens, the ninja girl and I passed by that spot just after the crash occurred, though we didn't realize what exactly had happened at the time. We only saw that emergency vehicles and police cars were swarming, and that blood was pooled on the ground. Not a sigh...

A Wall That's Difficult to Cross

That's Little Springtime's translation of the title of a speech that she composed in Japanese--越え難い壁. She won the local-colleges round of the competition and then won the all-New England round, which was held at the Japanese consulate in May. She's translated the speech into English, and I share it below the cut. You can also hear her give the speech in the YouTube video, but she speaks quickly, so it's hard to follow the subtitles in places.




I thought it must be just a small earthquake. That...