Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 19

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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Wednesday reading: Tales from the Inner City

I've been slowly reading through Shaun Tan's Tale from the Inner City, short stories and poems that accompany beautiful paintings of animals surreally present in a nameless city. I'd put it on my to-read list years ago, but was actually moved to read it when a Japanese guy on my Twitter reading list wrote an essay about one of the stories.

The essay (which I haven't finished yet) is about the cat story. Both the cat story and the dog story-poem are lovely; they say touching things about dogs and...

neighbors

I was in the supermarket, and an old guy came up to me--I thought I recognized him--and he asked, "Are you my neighbor?"

In that moment I realized who he was: he lives at the top of a cul-de-sac in the housing development I live in; his house is unlike any of the other houses in the development, a totally idiosyncratic pattern, never quite finished, with cinder blocks propping up the porch and real wood shingles instead of vinyl siding. I think he lives alone, except for his dog: he always has a ...

A Love Letter, by Nanao Sakaki

I first came upon this poem in 2007; I love it. I shared it back at the time, but that was 16 years ago, so I'm sharing it again--this time with illustrations. (Some of them are click-through-able to the original person's photo on Flickr... others are just shamelessly ripped from stock photos and what-have-you.)

"A Love Letter" was originally published in a collection called Break the Mirror.

( A Love Letter, by Nanao Sakaki )

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A new book in Sherwood Smith's Sartorias-deles series

Let the Torrent Dance Thee Down follows immediately on the harrowing saga of the Norsunder war. It has two parts. The first, Bridges, looks at the aftermath of the war for the various kings, queens, and assorted others we've come to know--characters whom we've seen grow up and who are still feeling out who they now are. Some have overcome terrible pasts or crippling self images; others are still in the process. Some can't grow past old injuries; others are learning to.

The second half, Torrent, ...

dandelion mandala

I made this over several hours, breathing in the scent of apple blossoms. Pure bliss.









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