Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 26

mooshed together

When we were in Letícia, I bought a bar of soap (and a beautiful green plastic bucket ) to wash out socks and underwear and things. The soap was just a bar of Dove soap, but it's not soap I buy at home, so the scent was new to me, and so it became the scent of vacation, a scent of Letícia. We brought it home with us (along with the bucket), and every time I use it, the scent takes me back there.

Now, though, it's mooshed together with some fragments of old soap. Familiar everyday soap fragrance a...

As the Tide Came Flowing In, by Sonya Taaffe

The problem I have with poems and stories that I like is that I keep wanting to read people good lines or passages for them, and it’s very easy to end up reading them the whole thing. It’s like giving a person a present, except you’re so excited about the present that you start unwrapping it for them, excitedly pointing out all its special features. I will try not to do that with Sonya’s most recent collection (poetry plus a novelette) BUT IT WILL BE HARD.

With Sonya, you’re never far away from...

narrow gangplanks/walkways, boats

I realized it's September, which means this little access stream, which is where we boarded all boats to get to the Amazon, will have dried up, or is about to. You can walk to those stilt houses across the way. (And those stilts tell you how high the water will get. Right now, though, the people in those houses are cultivating crops** that will mature in the months between now and the river rising, using the 40 centimeters of alluvial deposits the Amazon leaves behind as it recedes.)

Note: I'm l...

Exchange (airport poem, 8-30-2022

I had to pick up Wakanomori from the airport today, and these thoughts went through my head, looking at the currency exchange booth)

Exchange

Give me paper money in different colors & sizes w/metallic strips/clear windows & the faces of unfamiliar important people/flowers/mountains.
Look, I brought shells/rare seeds/these diamonds washed clean in the blood of innocents
surely
we can trade

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Two important book things and one story thing

Thing one: in case there are any people who follow me who don't follow the magnificent sovay (Sonya Taaffe), she has a new collection of poems, plus one novelette: As the Tide Came Flowing In, from Nekiya Press. Here is a link.

Sonya's poems are as if you picked up a piece of sea glass and were turning it over in your hands, feeling its smoothness, and then you held it up to the light, and suddenly you found yourself somewhere entirely different. And her stories are peopled with intense, intellig...

La gran ceiba

The kapok tree--Ceiba pentandra, ceiba in Spanish, is one of the three tallest types of tree in the rainforest. I have always dreamed of meeting one because...

When my kids were little, we were given The Great Kapok Tree, by Lynne Cherry. Gorgeously illustrated, it's the story of a woodcutter in the Amazon who falls asleep by a huge kapok tree he's been asked to cut down. While he's asleep, all the creatures (including a human child) who depend on the tree visit him and whisper in his ear about...

Paucar--Cacicus cela--káurë

A lot of what we saw and learned in the Amazon is taking me a while to digest because it's filtered through Spanish: I scribbled things down that people told me, but now in slow time I have to check what I wrote, find out if I heard things correctly and understood them correctly.

I just discovered a wonderful thing. While we were in Puerto Nariño (the other major town, other than Leticia, in the Colombian Amazon)--a town, incidentally, with a large number of Tikuna (Magüta) residents, including o...

painting signs

When we lived in Japan (nigh on 30 years ago--yikes!), the signs at various trains stations, advertising businesses in the towns, were often hand-painted. A dentist's office, an ob-gyn, a grocery store, a florist, etc. Sometimes we'd see someone painting a new one.

I hear from my kids in Japan that now, as here in America, they're mainly printed.

But in Letícia they are still hand-painted. We rented bikes one day and passed this guy, just short of the airport, painting a new sign (I asked him if ...

Wednesday reading

Some more quotes from Aventura en el Amazonas:

En verano llueve todos los días, en invierno llueve todo el día (In summer it rains every day, in winter it rains all day long)

... Or, why I need to go back at the peak of the rainy season and see if I still love it.

And this, from a section where the parents are talking to the children about the children's names (and also about their own names):

Tu nombre es como una cancíon que no acaba, el aqua limpia que corre desde la montaña sembrando vida (Your...

Insect, meet flower

Please enjoy the flying friend on the right-hand side of the picture, coming in for a landing (you can click through to see the photo larger and catch all the details)



And the many many creatures enjoying the nectar of this magnificent bloom



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