Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 31

cold days

This past week gave us plenty of cold days for frozen bubbles. I blew one beautiful big one that floated up past my neighbor's pussy willow tree and eventually snagged in the upper branches of my apple tree:



(The black blob in the sky is a crow)



Tangled up



One day I decided to walk a birthday card to the post office--to get there I chose a path along trails and through the woods. There were many animal tracks. This photo is from a different day, but it gives the sense of the busy traffic:



Eventually...

Into the red

Needed to get as close to the red as possible this evening. In the photos you see pink, but trust me: there was red.



By degrees



Deeper in



Deeper still



I carried red home inside me

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What if I? (the grocery store song), by Molly Grace

I love college radio. This song, "What if I?" by Molly Grace, played on WMUA--UMass Amherst's college radio station. I heard it when I was in the car in mid November, and the DJ was talking about the song, was talking about going to high school with the singer--I think he may have even said he had been in a band with her?

Anyway, I just fell in love with it in one listen, ESPECIALLY when it got to all the store names. If you're in the northeast, you're sure to recognize several of them.

I transcr...

Free Calls

On Thursday I picked up Wakanomori from the airport--he's back from the UK. We stopped around 7 pm at a rest stop on I-90, and as I was coming out of the bathrooms, I noticed a Verizon payphone, and on it, this remarkable sticker.



It starts with a blessing and a prayer, then turns to special needs: a job, help with Social Security and EBT (for people overseas, this is government food assistance), and then on to the lesser financial deities.

After snapping the photo, I wandered back to the table wh...

Divine ancestor meet-cute

I really enjoyed the Netflix documentary A Última Floresta (The Last Forest), directed by Luiz Bolognesi and cowritten by him and Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, about the present-day situation of the Yanomami people in Amazonian Brazil and Venezuela. Davi Kopenawa Yanomami is a Yanomami activist who helped get a law passed to protect Yanomami land after gold mining predations in the 1980s led to a fifth of the population dying from mercury poisoning and other sicknesses. The presidency of Jair Bolsona...

journal

I'm moving around some diaries I wrote, and I started reading the one I kept in Timor-Leste, and it's full of details that of course I'd completely forgotten. THANK YOU, past me, for writing things down!

Like this:

"More notes I made from the early morning in Dili: lettuce and other greens on the roofs of taxis; at one place where we waited, a little boy shooting tiny rubber bands through a gate at sparrows."

Or this from the bus from Ainaro back to Dili:

"Across the aisle from us, someone had a ro...

Laloran justisa

I keep on promising word-content, but the will is weak. Instead, have some pictures.

In the interim between Tetun classes, my classmate and I have been practicing, in part by watching the drama Laloran Justisa, Waves of Justice. It's subtitled in English, and I'll listen over and over to catch and try to learn the Tetun phrases. I take screenshots from it and then we ask each other questions about them in Tetun. But I love them also just for daily life in Timor-Leste, unspoken things that are con...

all the creatures of the great water, owl update

One of the best things about going to Logan Airport (Boston's international airport) is getting to visit with these creatures of the ocean, set in the floor:







Those are just some--there are more.

This journey, I took the time to read the artist's plaque. They are by Jane Goldman, and the title of the overall work is Atlantic Journey



Apparently it was completed the year we returned to the United States from England: 1998. We'd been in and out of Logan many times before that, but now I can't imagine a...

Christmas Eve miscellany

Yesterday, December 23, I did an angel with tidings of great joy. I had big, big ambitions for this picture! Unfortunately sometimes the execution doesn't quite live up to the plan. I can say about this angel's face... it has that naive look. Yes. Naive. Here are two views--one of the angel himself, and one photographed upside down and flipped (so the head and not the bottom of the robe are larger), in relation to the shepherd picture:





And here is the driveway this morning, just before sunrise!



....

Driveway Advent calendar, Dec 19–22

We're entering the home stretch now!

December 19 is a Christmas tree:



December 20 is stuck Santa--he just needs to wriggle a little to pop himself out.



December 21 is a raccoon receiving a present. What's in there? osprey_archer had the good idea of a box of corn, but I think for missroserose 's sake it has to be a colander, which the raccoon can use to rinse his vegetables--including his corn--in.



And today's drawing is a shepherd, watching his flock by night.



Last night it rain/sleeted, so it was j...