Five Questions

Ages ago, sovay gave me five questions to answer, and I'm finally getting around to it!

1. What do you drink by preference when it's cold out?

Mulled cranberry cider! Although I usually default to tea, because it does not involve as much effort as mulled cranberry cider, and I can have endless amounts of it. I drink Ceylon tea (which I brew in a little black clay teapot), with honey or "empty," depening on mood. When stressed, I  drink tea made w. teabags, but the question is not about that.

2. What season do you dream of most often?

Winter - the witeness of the snow, the stripped-down pin oaks, the fire in my fireplace, silence, stars.

3. What's the oldest game you know how to play?

Huh. Not sure. There is a children's tradition associated with Stryjski park - to bury "secrets," flower petals or leaves pressed under round flat pieces of glass, most often green or brown, but whatever can be found. Summer would be spent looking for such glass, and then the little flower-portraits would be buried in the autumn. In spring one was supposed to search for them, but that somehow never happened. I learned this from my mother, and she learned it when she was little, from the other children in Stryjski park . They learned it from someone, too; I don't know how old it is, and I've never encountered it elsewhere. Another very old thing - it's really not a game, but a children's folk tradition - is to come to the park in the early spring, when the thawing snow turns into rivulets and sings itself away, away, away. You release a boat - a paper boat you made, or a wooden boat, or perhaps simply a small flat piece of wood with a twig mast - and then you run after it, all the way after it downstream until it disappears from view; I don't remember if wishing is involved or not. That tradition is not local to the park; I did encounter it elsewhere in Russia and Ukraine, although I have no idea about other places.


(entrance to Stryjski Park; to the left towards the viewer, there is a beautiful grating in which my brother got stuck as a todder; to the right towards the viewer, Parkova street and the house in which my mother grew up. Entering the park and straight ahead, a lake with swans.)

4. What's your favorite item of clothing? (Worn by you or anyone else.)

All my favorite items of clothing are too small now. Argh, body image issues! Right now I am much less attached to clothing than I am to jewelry, or perhaps it's true that clothing was always secondary to jewelry for me. On others I probably admire hats and vests the most.

5. What single song would you ensure is not forgotten?

I think I've posted this already somewhere; Kol haOlam Kulo, attributed to Rabbi Nachman of Breslav. Here is a performance of it that I really like (link to youtube video).

kol haolam kulo
gesher tsar meod
ve haikar - lo lefakhed klal'

the whole world
is but a narrow bridge
and the main thing - not to be afraid at all.

Bonus:
Which fictional language would you most like to be real?

One of my own, probably Takiritalë, the Flowing (i.e. language) of Two-waters; I worked on it a lot as a teen. Excerpts from prayers in Takiritalë appear in my poem The Three Immigrations (currently not on submission anywhere). Second after that I'd probably choose Maro,  the language of a small tribe of Grayblood people that used to live in the north of Birdverse. Maro is a verbless language and is described in my trunked novel.

Perhaps this is a bad answer, because these languages are real for me. 

(I'm afraid I'll have to bow out of offering to ask you five questions - spoons).