Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 39

Our Lady of Kibeho / Parliaments

I read a play, Our Lady of Kibeho, by Katori Hall. It's about three girls in a Catholic secondary school in Kibeho, Rwanda, in 1981, who have visions of the Virgin Mary. The play is beautiful--sharp and funny and light and deep and sad and true and profound, but not at all pretentious, if you can believe it. Here's just one quote, from one of the visionaries:

I saw a girl. Running down a hill. She had legs so long they could take her into tomorrow. She had feet so quick they could cut down blade...

90 minutes to no vaccine

I was so proud of myself yesterday when I jumped at the signal from the Massachusetts Twitter bot that lets you know when vaccines come available. I got one for me! And then one for Wakanomori, for today .... But his was in Great Barrington and mine was in North Adams... which are both about 90 minutes away. Self, if you are going to jump on vaccines, maybe jump on ones that are just a little bit closer?

But what was done was done, so we both gamely set aside pressing work and drove into the Ber...

We could all use more knife throwing in our lives

My neighbors to the right, the mom dresses her two little daughters in matching clothes, they have fleets of dolls, and for Easter they got armfuls of plush peeps. The neighbors to the left, dad and little daughter bond over knife throwing. SO METAL.

Throwing (that's my laundry you can see hanging up in the background)



Retrieval



The next toss hit the target. My neighbor looked up at me, beaming with pride--as well she should! Little heroine. You will definitely want her in your D&D party.

(How han...

come over to the just side; we have sparkles

Here is one of my next-door neighbors, obliging me by recreating the pose I saw her in while she was playing with her dolls. I thought she looked like an Easter egg, waiting to be found.



That was Saturday. Then yesterday she and her sister were sporting these shirts that said JUSTICE in sparkles! (Hiding the face for privacy; that way I don't feel weird sharing the photo publicly)



I was amused/bemused. I think it's great that capitalist forces now think justice is marketable enough to mass produce...

Magical Ducks for Easter/end of Passover

Back in December, the daughter of the novelist Grace Lin, who lives in the region, was creating and selling magical ducks as a fundraiser for the emergency fund her school's PTO had set up for families in need. I bought a few, and today several of them have taken residence in the nooks and crannies of the wall of the nearby railway bridge:



Here are a couple from a distance--can you see them?



And up close:



Here's another at a distance and up close:





And the last one:





It's kind of a stressful bridge to ...

not a checklist

I was just realizing that two of my friends here on Dreamwidth are building little miniature scenes. "Huh," I thought to myself. "That's an interesting coincidence." [the joke will be on me as it turns out that ALL my friends on Dreamwidth are building little miniature scenes]

Then I thought, "Wow, come to think of it, they also both can tell horrifying and yet entertaining stories of their childhood--that's something else they have in common. And they both enjoy gardening. And they're both write...

Little White Duck: A Childhood in China

Little White Duck: A Childhood in China, by Na Liu (text) and her husband Andrés Vera Martínez (art), is a collection of seven vignettes, done graphic-novel style, from the author's childhood. She was born in 1973 in Wuhan, China. Eventually she came to the United States, and now she's a doctor of hematology and oncology. She wanted to make this book to tell her daughter what life was like in China in that era, and I found it so engrossing that I sat in my car, reading it, after having picked it...

a flower and a knife

Have a jasmine flower. You can stand beside it and feel sultry in a tiny way.




A knife (no photo)

There is a knife in my knife drawer that has a vendetta against me. We were mortal enemies in a previous life, I guess: I must have been a fool who blunted it, using it to cut willow switches or to carve my initials in a beech tree, or maybe I was a careless crafter who ruined it with glue, or maybe I foiled the schemes of the person whose grip around its handle it loved best in all the world---in any ...

I am ... I have been

I always love poems and incantations that take the form, "I am the [thing] that ..." Just now I encountered something purporting to be from something called the Hymn of Sekhmet that has these lines:

I am the broken wax seal on my lover’s letters.
I am the phoenix, the fiery sun, consuming and resuming myself.

And it reminded me of the song of Amergin:

"I am the wind on the sea;
I am the wave of the sea;
I am the bull of seven battles;
I am the eagle on the rock
I am a flash from the sun;
I am the most b...

Kiku to Isamu

This remarkable movie, Kiku to Isamu, is about the lives of biracial siblings, older sister Kiku and younger brother Isamu, being raised by their frail grandmother deep in the Japanese countryside. It was made in 1959 and is an amazingly clear-eyed, unsentimental depiction of Japanese prejudice--that also contains a stinging indictment of American racism. People keep telling the old granny that she should see about getting the kids adopted through a program that brings the offspring of Japanese ...