Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 79

la niña juega con su sombra

Spanish Duolingo often has intriguing or provocative sentences for you to translate. This post's subject line was one I got last night:



(The girl plays with her shadow)

The child plays with her shadow
Jumping, jumping
To free her playmate
From the tether of her feet



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at the intersection

I liked the people who were waiting at the red light with me at the intersection of US route 202 and Massachusetts route 33. I was in the middle of three lanes, with my windows rolled down. To my left I could hear pleasant music. I stole a glance: the driver was large-necked, middle-aged woman with a relaxed and pleasant face. To my right was a guy on a motorcycle. He had a grizzled beard, maybe six inches long, that tapered to a point. Someone in a pickup truck driving across the intersectio...

thanks to missroserose

Who found this image and story of a tiny floating shelter that, as she says, looks like it could be from Mermaid's Hands! The houses in Mermaid's Hands are made of salvaged wood and roofed with thatch, but with corrugated metal over the kitchen portion, but people living in Mermaid's Hands are adaptable and would love the painting on the side.


Source

It was found floating 180 miles south of Grand Isle, Louisiana. Pen Pal starts with Em wondering what would happen if she could detach her house a...

this evening, two different times

First, let me tell you what the parking lot at the supermarket was like, around 5:45 pm, on my way home. There was a smell of cinnamon, maybe from someone's discarded gum, and the sun was at the edge of a tide of rain-colored clouds, and there were goldfinches somewhere nearby--you couldn't see them, but you could hear them.

Now let me show you what the sky was like closer to home, about an hour later.



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A look inside a vineyard--now with a few corrections

My dad has a friend--and now I have a friend--who co-owns a vineyard and winery--the Hudson Chatham winery. I was especially interested to get a look at it because I'd just copyedited a novella by Joyce Chng in which the protagonist inherits a vineyard. It was really cool to see the actual reality.

My big takeaway was that a vineyard is HARD WORK. Here is my friend pruning the vines in a cold time of year (she gave me permission to use the photo)



Here are those same grapevines this past weeken...

The silent protest

If it wasn't for today's Google doodle, I wouldn't have learned about the Silent Protest of 1917 or the massacre of East St. Louis. It's a deeply evil streak in humanity that gets people to delight in the slaughter of the defenseless. I'm full of deep gratitude and admiration for the people, like Ida B. Wells and James Weldon Johnson, who have the courage to fight against that evil. (After seeing the Google doodle, I read this article on the Silent Protest.)

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between the sunlight and the air

Because yesterday and last night were unseasonably cold but the air was warmer this morning, there was mist everywhere when I went out.

Everywhere was gauzy.





Up the street, down the street--ethereal





It seems that otherworldly dancers passed through, too, leaving behind their handkerchiefs, as they often do, on lawns, beside paths, and in the woods:







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buttonbush

The Ashley reservoir is now one of my go-to places to take people when they visit. I took my old college friend and her husband there, and learned that the water-loving plant that I had thought looked very mangrove-y is buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis), which grows up and down the Atlantic coast and as far inland as the Mississippi, and is indeed a species in the mangrove biome!

Buttonbush



Yesterday I took osprey_archer there (and we read aloud to each other--so much fun), and lo and beho...

Idiosyncratic special-made authors card game

Did you ever play the authors card game? We had this when I was a kid: 13 authors--a pretty random assortment of 19th-century English and American writers, all men with the exception of Louisa May Alcott--with four works for each author. You play it like you play Go Fish, with the goal being to get as many completed sets of authors' works as possible. Wakanomori and I enjoyed playing it the other day, but I thought it would be fun to make up a set of YA fantasy works. osprey_archer is visitin...

witness bears

Out of the corner of my ear I was listening to a Cornell West lecture from the 1990s, and in it he said "witness bearers," but I heard "witness bears," and I know bare-bear-bear wordplay is low-hanging fruit, but here is a witness bear.



In other news, Wakanomori and I are nearly done watching Person of Interest. I *really* have liked this show. Not every single everything--I'm not into gangster plotlines--but all the characters, intensely, and the care with which the overall story arc was hand...