Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 173

Explosion in Springfield

Writing from the road, so not able to check up on my friends list, but this story , about a gas explosion in Springfield? It was the club I wrote about in this entry . Now it is a hole in the ground. And I am a state away, but apparently 20-some miles away, in B-town, the explosion made the windows rattle.

Will be checking LJ properly in twenty-four hours or so. Meanwhile, hang in there, friends. No gas leaks!

Wild persimmons and regional voices

photo by rivadock4 on Flickr

A program I've liked for many years is Pulse of the Planet, which "provides its listeners with a two-minute sound portrait of Planet Earth, trackng the rhythms of nature, culture and science worldwide and blending interviews and extraordinary natural sound."

Today's program was on harvesting wild persimmons.

My earliest memory is of going out to a place in Indiana near where I grew up in October or November after the first frost or cold snap. There were three of us k...

What the camera dragged in

Cultivating a frost garden
it is a meditation on impermanence and on the shelter of shadows.



Repent and/or Welcome
Repent and then you're welcome? You're welcome to repent? ... And since when does one buy a ready-painted "repent" sign?



Trees
My friend is drawing trees (here and here and here)--see how magnificently they twist and tangle? I admired them assiduously and she sent me some! A tarot of trees.



Back in September, with the help of an impromptu writing workshop, I decided that the protagoni...

Short story recommendation: Speed of Love

I liked this story, "Speed of Love," by Deborah Walker, for showing alienness in how time is experienced. It reminded me a little, in that respect, of Nancy Fulda's very cool Hugo-nominated story "Movement," about an adolescent with temporal autism (it's another story to read, or listen to, if you're unfamiliar with it).

Time is such a strange phenomenon, stranger than light-as-waves and light-as-particles, in how we perceive it; I like thinking about these v-e-r-y small time travels--as I sai...

showing your mettle

Sometimes, maybe, you sit musing on how well you’d do if ever your mettle was tested--if robbers burst into the bank and announced, “This is a stick-up!” the afternoon that you went to cash your check, say.

Then again, maybe you **know**, because you’ve actually lived the experience--as turns out to be the case for a friend of mine. I can’t recall what the conversation was that led to her recollecting being robbed at knife point,1 but I do recall that as soon as she said robbed at knife point...

The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, by Dinaw Mengestu

Sometime back I asked for suggestions for books I could offer to my book group to choose from. In the end, the book they chose to read was one I found by following up some other leads: The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, by Dinaw Mengestu. Mengestu emigrated from Ethiopia to the United States with his family when he was a small child; the story is about a man, now a shopkeeper, who did so as a teenager. It's very understated, small-scale, melancholy (yet with many moments of humor), and t...

Video for Donors Choose

Someone near and dear to me was involved in the creation of a video to promote Donors Choose, an organization that get supplies to underfunded public schools. The schools or classrooms can post their needs, and then donors choose which to give to.



The video is really moving; you can view it here.

Here are some screen shots and quotes:


“Our kids have so much potential; there’s just times when we don’t have the things we need to help them”


“The look of a kid who gets a new book—it’s just magical.”


“...

Five-cent Coke, and the thoughts it occasions

NPR had a great story this morning about why Coca-Cola's price remained a nickel from 1886 into the 1950s--some 70 years as the same price: "Why Coke Cost a Nickel for 70 Years"

It was because of a poor deal that the president of Coca-Cola made with two lawyers who wanted to buy bottling rights for Coke, back when selling soda in bottles was a brand new idea: he agreed to sell the syrup to the bottlers at a fixed price--forever.

Andrew Young, an economist at West Virginia University, says the p...

word play

A post of cafenowhere 's reminded me of a sign I saw when I was driving the healing angel to school. (Indeed, it was on that journey that I discovered the brakes were going to need fixing sooner rather than later, and hence the depositing of the car with the mechanic and the walk home in the rain.)

exit only, the sign said, but I saw an S in there, somehow, sneaky snaky S, insinuating in, active imagination, poor vision, I don't know! Anyway, add an S in the right place, and the message becomes...

rainy day

I walked up the highway in the rain, having left the car to have its brakes looked at.

I passed a house with a gazebo attached:



If I lived there, every time it was rainy, I'd sit out in the gazebo and drink a hot drink, watching the rain fall, and watching the hot water vapor curling off the drink and rising up to meet the huge and wild rain spirits all around. Born somewhere small and domestic, but off to explore the wilderlands.

Here is a house with paint peeling. I love houses in just this st...