Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 63

A thought about daylight

Daylight plays hide-and-seek with the world. It hides in the southern hemisphere at the year's end/beginning and in the northern hemisphere in the middle months. It wears itself out running, but it has a safety zone--a save point, a "base"--in the equatorial region. It always rests there.

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wishes so far

I have a great bouquet of wishes for the Hot Chocolate Run--which is this coming Sunday. Behold!



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a house, a stove, an iron

sartorias 's really moving entry on places she's lived and what became of them reminded me of a conversation I had yesterday when I went out looking for an iron. I'd been ironing, and mine had given up the ghost, just one sleeve short of a finished shirt. (You know what that means! I finished ironing that sleeve by heating up my cast-iron skillet on the stove. We need full use of all our limbs in this household.)

There were no irons at the supermarket and no irons at the CVS, but at the Dollar...

a salted codfish

From The Snow Queen

No one was at home except an old Lapp woman, who was cooking fish over a whale-oil lamp. The reindeer told her Gerda's whole story, but first he told his own, which he thought was much more important. Besides, Gerda was so cold that she couldn't say a thing.

"Oh, you poor creatures," the Lapp woman said, "you've still got such a long way to go. Why, you will have to travel hundreds of miles into the Finmark. For it's there that the Snow Queen is taking a country vacation, an...

Hot Chocolate Run--wishes

For a couple of year's I've participated in Northampton's annual Hot Chocolate Run , held in December. It's a huge event, attracting thousands, and at the end of the run you're given a mug of, yes, hot chocolate. Wakanomori's done it many more years than I have, so we have quite a collection of mugs.

The run raises money for Safe Passage , an organization that helps families that have lived with domestic violence. I'm a very lackluster fundraiser; I'm too aware that there are many important caus...

Haunting of Hill House

The healing angel and I watched this--I liked it a lot, especially in the sense that it's a family dealing with deep, ongoing trauma and loss. I'm vaguely aware of people expressing discontent at the ending, but I found it satisfying. What did dissatisfy me was the logical mechanism of the malevolent supernatural element, but the healing angel and I hashed it out at length, and I feel like like we arrived at (slightly different) ways of understanding it that made sense. For those of you who w...

why people confide in strangers

Sometimes things happen like this:

I and a couple of others were waiting for a bus of Japanese high-school students at the Basketball Hall of Fame. We were part of the group that was hosting them/showing them around. While we waited, a local kid (high school senior), hurried into the museum, followed a few minutes later by his mother, with money for lunch. She'd driven him there, but he'd rushed in without money, and she wanted him to be able to get food.

Her mission accomplished, the mom didn'...

Every Word Knows Something of a Vicious Circle--Nobel Lecture of Herta Müller

A friend sent me a PDF of 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature winner Herta Müller's Nobel lecture, "Every Word Knows Something of a Vicious Circle," and it is stunning--wise on love, words, steadfastness, solitude, totalitarianism. It starts like this:

DO YOU HAVE A HANDKERCHIEF was the question my mother asked me every morning, standing by the gate to our house, before I went out onto the street. I didn’t have a handkerchief. And because I didn’t, I would go back inside and get one. I never had a...

written word, spoken word

Sherwood Smith asked me some really interesting questions that The Inconvenient God raised for her, and she posted the questions and answers over on the Book View Cafe blog ( here ).

I think my favorite question was the one about whether writing words down chains them. The technology of writing is really wonderful and makes miracles possible, in terms of sharing and transmission, but the spoken word has real power too. I love thinking about their different strengths.

And speaking of spoken word (...

Halloween mouth

This year for Halloween I decided to turn the big pot we use to hand candy out into a gaping mouth. ARE YOU BRAVE ENOUGH TO PUT YOUR HAND IN THE GOBLIN'S MOUTH TO RETRIEVE A PIECE OF CANDY?

Here is the armature, all papier-mâchéd over:



And here it is with tissue paper for the final colors and details:



It looks a lot less menacing colored in, huh! I ... wonder if I could/should have made it a little more scary. Ah well, it's probably better not to terrify the trick-or-treaters.

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