Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 18

mulberries

The two berries I used to pick and eat as a kid were mulberries and black raspberries (a different fruit from blackberries--we had no blackberries where I grew up but plenty of black raspberries). Black raspberries grow on prickly canes, and you can find them in abandoned lots and beside railroad tracks. I was a pro at finding places to pick them.

Mulberries grow on trees. When I was a kid, there was a copse of three or so sapling-sized mulberry trees on my street, at the edge of someone's prop...

horizontal as well as vertical

We're watching The Makanai (舞子さんちのまかなないさん; Maikosanchi no makanai san）on Netflix; the present-day story of two sixteen-year-old best friends who leave their northern Aomori town to go to Kyoto to train as maiko (pre-geisha). One of them, Sumire is exceptionally suited to it; the other, Kiyo, isn't--but Kiyo finds her feet as the makanai, the cook, for the house.

In the episode we saw the other day, the mother of the house is walking with a male friend, and she's talking about all the good-luck ch...

milkweed! flowers, fiber, twine

This year I'm mainly growing milkweed. Milkweed for flowers, milkweed with the garlic and other vegetables:





In part that's for pollinators and monarch butterflies, but it's also in large part for the super strong, super beautiful **fibers* that milkweed produces. I realized I can put that chambira fiber knowledge to work here with my own, local fibers. I used to have a goal of trying to spin the fibers... in spite of the fact that I've never spun anything. But in the Amazon, they're not spinning...

Yukimi Ogawa's Like Smoke, Like Light

This week Mike Allen's Mythic Delirium Press published Like Smoke, Like Light, a collection of short stories by Yukimi Ogawa. Yukimi Ogawa is remarkable: she lives in Tokyo and doesn't feel hugely confident speaking English, but she writes in English, and her stories are imaginative, surprising, and memorable. She's been published in Clarkesworld, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and, back in the day, Mythic Delirium--among others.

There are more or less three types ...

roads that conform to the human foot

Paul Salopek, this morning, talking about traveling in rural Yunnan Province, China:

Almost without being aware of it, [we] are losing touch with the human hand itself, what the human hand can make ... This realization paradoxically gelled when I stepped over the Myanmar border into China, possibly because I had these conceptions that I'd be walking into the most industrialized country in the world. And I didn't. Instead ... not only [are] the houses all handmade, but the roads to reach them were...

Life is troublesome

The other day Netflix laid some real wisdom on wakanomori and me in the form of a conversation in 逃げるは恥だが役に立つ (The Full-Time Wife Escapist). I recommend this short series! It's funny and insightful, and its characters are unusual and likable.

The wisdom was in what the awkward, shy male lead (Hiramasa) says to the female lead (Mikuri) in a key moment. She's just said that Hiramasa doesn't need to put up with all the bother and trouble that a relationship with her entails and run off to her "off...

40 days

No doubt you've heard the story of the four children--oldest only 13, youngest only 11 months at the start of the ordeal--who survived in the Amazon rain forest for 40 days after the small plane they were in crashed. The oldest, a girl named Lesly, was able to take care of her younger siblings, including the baby, until rescuers eventually found them.

The children were indigenous, and family members say that they were familiar with the forest, and Lesly had knowledge of which fruits and roots we...

carrots

The cashier was a very tiny, very young looking girl. Like I might have guessed fourteen. But probably even in our new, child-labor-laws-are-to-be-laughed-away reality, she was actually more like ... sixteen. I was buying, among other things, carrots. A five-pound bag of big, fat carrots.

"Wow," the cashier murmured. "These are really big carrots."

"They really are!" I agreed.

"I wish I could get my brother to grow carrots," she said, all wistful and dreamy.

"Does your brother have a garden?" I aske...

A handwritten newspaper

I get a lot of hope and ideas for ways things can be better from stories about what people are doing in so-called developing countries. Often they seem like things I myself could tackle, or I with a few friends--like writing a newspaper to cover events of interest or concern in my local neighborhood. Unlike Mohammad Hasan Parvez, I could even do it with aid from a computer. He writes out the newspaper by hand.

Parvez lives in a small village in southern Bangladesh, and to earn money, he does vari...

next picture in Semillas y Huevos

When last I shared from Semillas y Huevos, the kids were planting an egg. So now we have them sliding avocado seeds underneath a hen :-)

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Only two pictures left to do (the avocado tree with eggs for fruit and the little chicks that are little walking, cheeping avocados, heh!)

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