Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 159

the laid-low locust, the blackberry blossom, and curling goatsbeard

This locust sapling was blown over by a big wind sometime during the winter, snapped almost entirely from its base--but not entirely enough, and so it blooms and grows, even laid flat on the asphalt. Remarkable. You can't break **people** that way and have them keep on growing and blooming (though people are very resilient in their Homo sapiens way).




The blackberry blossom, well the last time I saw one
Was down in a bramble where I rambled in the spring
(Michelle Shocked, "Blackberry Blossom")




An...

Be of bobolink cheer

I've had some downs recently, but one thing that twice has cheered me up is the song of the bobolink. I shared a Youtube video of it singing with cafenowhere and jaylake , but you two, if you should see this entry, this is a different one, a less pro video, but it is closer to the experience I have, hearing it early in the morning in the nearby meadows.

(29 seconds long)


Another Youtube video quotes F. Schuyler Matthews, who in 1909 described the song as "a mad, wreckless, song fantasia, an outb...

At the food van

Actually, it's not a free-standing van, it's a trailer, towed behind another vehicle, and it has a generator at the front to power the grill, the refrigerator, the water in the sink, etc.

Paris let me take photos of it all. Here she is at the window, talking on her cell to a customer.



And here is the same view from inside! It's a whole little world in there, a tiny, efficient kitchen.



Here's the menu, in case you're wondering what a person might be ordering.




Come take a look beyond the veil...



Her...

Wise business advice

Many of my creative friends here on LJ have considered entrepreneurial ventures involving their art, and of those creative friends, many of the writers have considered self-publishing, either as an adjunct to their traditional-publishing career or as an alternative.

If you need someone to talk to you intelligently about your options, let me recommend most highly Maggie Hogarth ( haikujaguar on LJ), who offers her services here. A $20 email consultation is an excellent investment if you are thin...

best bouquet

Feral lilies-of-the-valley, in a slender 8-oz coke bottle.

sidelined

Over the weekend, I found a portion of a freight train, sidelined, engineless,
going nowhere, and yet with so much to offer, carrying materials to make so many things.



How metaphorical, I thought.

A shiny new padlock on the rusty point-switch prevents anyone without the key from moving those cars onto the main line.



Here's the last car. A person can climb right up onto it, if she's inclined. There's no one to see her do it but the siberian olives, aspens, and black willows.



If she did, she'd have...

Holy Fire and wisteria waves

I walked in the woods with a student of wakanomori 's while he ran a road race. We saw wild columbine and wild strawberries and fungicidal (I just learned this from urbpan ) garlic mustard and starflowers and other things I didn't recognize, and I called horses to us, which made me feel magical, but best of all we talked, and sometimes--sometimes--you can say and understand a whole lot with words that only touch on the edges of things. She gave me a glimpse of the ocean inside her, which I reco...

The Case of Maddie Lawrence

Sometimes people aren’t led to fairyland by ghost-pale lights or bewitching smiles . Sometimes it simply swallows them up, gulps them down. They fall into it without realizing. They’re lost and don’t even know it.

Like Maddie, walking home from the train station after a long day at work. She stops to admire a crabapple in full bloom, ghostly in the black-and-white of nighttime, luminous—from the starlight? Like the petals are cups filled up with it.

Her head becomes completely filled with peta...

riches and dangers of the meadow

Wild strawberries blooming in a field...



... and growing in among them, new shoots of poison ivy...



(The little red leaves)

So, in a month's time, this area should be dotted with sweet, bright red berries. But you will have to be careful as you reach down to pick them, because the poison ivy will be taller and broader, too.

colors

It's been dry--usually there'd be water lurking and glinting among the skunk cabbages and the tussock grass, but all the same--behold! A northern jungle:



...Here sassafras raises elegant, cupped hands, pale translucent green



and here, in the yard of a semi-abandoned house in our neighborhood, sheep sorrel gone to sparkling seed--you can see why sorrel means a reddish color.