Actually, it's not a free-standing van, it's a trailer, towed behind another vehicle, and it has a generator at the front to power the grill, the refrigerator, the water in the sink, etc.

Paris let me take photos of it all. Here she is at the window, talking on her cell to a customer.



And here is the same view from inside! It's a whole little world in there, a tiny, efficient kitchen.



Here's the menu, in case you're wondering what a person might be ordering.



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Thank you, Paris! And here's hoping for a brisk business all summer!

Many of my creative friends here on LJ have considered entrepreneurial ventures involving their art, and of those creative friends, many of the writers have considered self-publishing, either as an adjunct to their traditional-publishing career or as an alternative.

If you need someone to talk to you intelligently about your options, let me recommend most highly Maggie Hogarth (haikujaguar on LJ), who offers her services here. A $20 email consultation is an excellent investment if you are thinking of pouring your resources into a venture.

I am very grateful--and expect to continue to be grateful--for very excellent free advice I've received from all sorts of people, from my nearest family members to friends I've only interacted with online. And I hope all of you have similar people in your life whom you can turn to. But there's always a risk of wearing out your welcome if you bother people **too** much. That's where a professional consultation comes in handy. (And, I should add, haikujaguar is a very generous soul who shares tips, ideas, and insights freely--and for free--on her LJ, too.)

While I'm at it, let me also recommend her book on running a Kickstarter. I'm not thinking of running one anytime soon, but her walk-through of the process and the things you need to take into account is fascinating.

From Spark to Finish: Running Your Kickstarter Campaign, available from Smashwords here and from Amazon here.

Feral lilies-of-the-valley, in a slender 8-oz coke bottle.

Over the weekend, I found a portion of a freight train, sidelined, engineless,
going nowhere, and yet with so much to offer, carrying materials to make so many things.



How metaphorical, I thought.

A shiny new padlock on the rusty point-switch prevents anyone without the key from moving those cars onto the main line.



Here's the last car. A person can climb right up onto it, if she's inclined. There's no one to see her do it but the siberian olives, aspens, and black willows.



If she did, she'd have a high vantage point from which to view a sign, telling her where she is.



Then it would be time to retrace her steps, past the siberian olives and the aspens. They make their home in so-called waste places.



I love those places.

I walked in the woods with a student of wakanomori's while he ran a road race. We saw wild columbine and wild strawberries and fungicidal (I just learned this from urbpan) garlic mustard and starflowers and other things I didn't recognize, and I called horses to us, which made me feel magical, but best of all we talked, and sometimes--sometimes--you can say and understand a whole lot with words that only touch on the edges of things. She gave me a glimpse of the ocean inside her, which I recognized because of the ocean inside me.

The town where the road race was held had more population a hundred years ago than now. It was chock full of churches, and even buildings that weren't churches looked rather churchlike.

Here is an actual church. The sermon will be on Holy Fire. Jonathan Edwards would approve. You don't get more New England than this.



After we parted ways, wakanomori and I went to Lilacland, where this time I took lots of photos of wisteria. Wisteria is called fuji in Japanese, and classical Japanese poems often talk about fujinami--wisteria waves. Here are those waves:







And below the cut, for sartorias, some more lilacs.

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Sometimes people aren’t led to fairyland by ghost-pale lights or bewitching smiles . Sometimes it simply swallows them up, gulps them down. They fall into it without realizing. They’re lost and don’t even know it.

Like Maddie, walking home from the train station after a long day at work. She stops to admire a crabapple in full bloom, ghostly in the black-and-white of nighttime, luminous—from the starlight? Like the petals are cups filled up with it.

Her head becomes completely filled with petals and starlight, and then at some point she blinks and starts and thinks, Did I just doze off ?

And,

Where am I, again?

There’s a lake up ahead, filled with water lilies. Some are breaking free from their stems and rising off the lake, spinning lazily into the air.

Is she maybe dreaming? Did I maybe leave out the part where she got home, collapsed on the couch without brushing her teeth, and fell asleep?

Maybe I’m the one that’s dreaming, or maybe you are.

It gets worse. Who am I, again? she’s thinking. She knits her brow, trying to pull together some thoughts, trying to make some sense of things, but the only thought that comes to her is something about bells—is it that the lilies can be rung, like bells, if you catch one?

Maddie has that nagging feeling that she needs to remember something. It’s important, so she strains to, shuts her eyes squint-closed and presses her lips together hard, but it’s no good.

When she opens her eyes, someone with black and white fur on their cheeks standing in front of her, someone with a red tattoo in the shape of a star between their eyes.

“Lanterns, or bells?” this person asks, holding out both hands, and in both hands are lilies, tugging to be free from this person’s grasp. Those on the right are glowing slightly; those on the left chime, subsonically, when they brush against each other.

“Bells,” says Maddie, and the person smiles and hands her a lily, and she smiles and takes it.


water lilies, by Tom Arbour (original here)

Wild strawberries blooming in a field...



... and growing in among them, new shoots of poison ivy...



(The little red leaves)

So, in a month's time, this area should be dotted with sweet, bright red berries. But you will have to be careful as you reach down to pick them, because the poison ivy will be taller and broader, too.

I have a card my mother sent me once, and it has for a picture a graceful tree with thin, curling branches and elegant leaves, and on each branch is a different sort of bird--a pretty fantasy. Except today it was real: in the white lilac, I saw all at once a cardinal, an oriole, a catbird, a tufted titmouse, and two amazing yellow-and-black striped birds, magnolia warblers, I think maybe. So much color! Red and orange and black and sleek dark gray and softer, warmer gray, and then the yellow and black. A paradise of birds.



Here are what the birds really look like:

( bird photos from GoogleCollapse )

I was very excited to get The Other Half of the Sky (Athena Andreadis, ed.), as I like science fiction (though I rarely read it these days) and I like stories with strong female characters. This anthology promises both, and if the first story I read is anything to judge by, it will deliver.

I started with Aliette de Bodard’s “The Waiting Stars,” because I’ve been dying and dying to read something by Aliette. (And why have you not read anything yet, Asakiyume? There are plenty of opportunities. You even bought Scattered among Strange Worlds, and yet haven’t read it yet. --Good question: it’s down, I think, to the burdens of work and having other things I either needed or wanted to read that kept jumping the queue.)

“The Waiting Stars” has two storylines: there’s the story of Lan Nhen and her cousin Cuc, engaged in the daring rescue of their great aunt, who is the Mind of a Mind-ship—that is, the living intellect that animates and controls the functions of a deep-space-traveling ship. Her great aunt was one of a number of Mind-ships shot and crippled by the Outsiders, as they call members of the Galactic Federation of United Planets. The Outsiders/Galactic Federation are not a nice bunch:

[The Outsiders] were the descendants of an Exodus fleet that had hit an isolated galaxy: left to themselves and isolated for decades, they had turned on each other in huge ethnic cleansings before emerging from their home planets as relentless competitors for resources and inhabitable planets.

(Lan Nhen, Cuc, and the Mind-ships, by contrast, come from the empire of Dai Viet.)

The other storyline follows Catherine, a refugee from Dai Viet brought to the Outsider world of Prime with others like her are educated in an Institution reminiscent of the Indian schools set up in Canada and the United States ostensibly to educate the children of First Peoples but actually to acculturate them to the conquering culture and erase their native language and customs. These two storylines converge in a neat way that I figured out just as it was unfolding, which is always satisfying.

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The Other Half of the Sky

golden golden early morning. So beautiful.





On this same early morning walk I saw two deer bound away and a heron fly by, and a bluebird.

( I thought I saw one sort of heron, but maybe it was just another, much more common sort of heronCollapse )

Also, wirewalking has three ferrets, and one of them climbed up on me. I took a blurry photo: