I have known since April that Readercon would not happen this weekend, but more recently we had made plans with my family and those did not come off either, so what ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch and I actually did this afternoon was wander around for two and a half hours in the simmering heat and buffeting winds out of a clear sky. I forgot to take my camera, so of course we passed yards of roses in alebrije-pink and cream-yellow and day lilies in coral-orange and ribbon-candy-violet and a wide range of clematis, including one neon purple specimen starfishing out of the middle of something like a box hedge. I have seen some weird construction jobs in Somerville, but I am awarding a special prize to the house mid-renovation that had been sheared clean off behind its facade right down to the brickwork of the basements. From the back, it looked like the Blitz or Roman ruins. From the front, it looked ready to fall on Buster Keaton. All the windows were propped up with timbers and full of blue sky. We had to negotiate a couple of bottlenecks of semi-masked fellow-walkers (or even sometimes fully masked, but on narrow paths where maintaining a full six feet would have put one of us in the poison ivy), but we actually managed to walk our traditional loop around the Mystic River, starting from the Blessing of the Bay Boathouse, following Route 16 across the Medford Veterans Memorial Bridge, climbing the wooden observation tower in the silflay field of what turns out to be Torbert Macdonald State Park, and eventually returning via the Fellsway to the concrete thunder sheet of I-93. We spent a lot of time by the water—Rob took a panorama on his phone. The wind smelled tidal and full of waterweed; we saw a mother mallard with seven ducklings wriggling industriously among the sargasso-drifts. We saw terns swinging above the late glitter of the water; one dropped as suddenly as a stone only to catch itself back up into the air again, the coin-scrap of a tiny fish in its bill. Hopping in and out of the trees growing down to the water, hovering against the wind over the accessible planks of the dock, we kept seeing the same kind of small bird, buff-headed, with a crest like a jay's or a cardinal's, a thin black stripe of an eye-mask, a lemon-colored undercarriage and tail-tip, and a blood-bead brightness at the edges of its wings: it turns out to have been the cedar waxwing. The even tinier bird whose shoulders flashed a startling, iridescent blue looks like it was a tree swallow. Instead of following the Mystic Valley Parkway, we stuck as much as possible to the trails within the park, which is how we passed the older woman harvesting pokeweed from the side of the path. "You can cook it," she explained, as if we had looked funny at her over our masks, "it's delicious!" so I called back an agreement on poke salad and wished her a good evening. We ourselves had soup dumplings for dinner and I have done nothing of any practical value since.
I am having a difficult time with my physical embodiment at the moment, but I like this picture Rob took of me.
spatch and I actually did this afternoon was wander around for two and a half hours in the simmering heat and buffeting winds out of a clear sky. I forgot to take my camera, so of course we passed yards of roses in alebrije-pink and cream-yellow and day lilies in coral-orange and ribbon-candy-violet and a wide range of clematis, including one neon purple specimen starfishing out of the middle of something like a box hedge. I have seen some weird construction jobs in Somerville, but I am awarding a special prize to the house mid-renovation that had been sheared clean off behind its facade right down to the brickwork of the basements. From the back, it looked like the Blitz or Roman ruins. From the front, it looked ready to fall on Buster Keaton. All the windows were propped up with timbers and full of blue sky. We had to negotiate a couple of bottlenecks of semi-masked fellow-walkers (or even sometimes fully masked, but on narrow paths where maintaining a full six feet would have put one of us in the poison ivy), but we actually managed to walk our traditional loop around the Mystic River, starting from the Blessing of the Bay Boathouse, following Route 16 across the Medford Veterans Memorial Bridge, climbing the wooden observation tower in the silflay field of what turns out to be Torbert Macdonald State Park, and eventually returning via the Fellsway to the concrete thunder sheet of I-93. We spent a lot of time by the water—Rob took a panorama on his phone. The wind smelled tidal and full of waterweed; we saw a mother mallard with seven ducklings wriggling industriously among the sargasso-drifts. We saw terns swinging above the late glitter of the water; one dropped as suddenly as a stone only to catch itself back up into the air again, the coin-scrap of a tiny fish in its bill. Hopping in and out of the trees growing down to the water, hovering against the wind over the accessible planks of the dock, we kept seeing the same kind of small bird, buff-headed, with a crest like a jay's or a cardinal's, a thin black stripe of an eye-mask, a lemon-colored undercarriage and tail-tip, and a blood-bead brightness at the edges of its wings: it turns out to have been the cedar waxwing. The even tinier bird whose shoulders flashed a startling, iridescent blue looks like it was a tree swallow. Instead of following the Mystic Valley Parkway, we stuck as much as possible to the trails within the park, which is how we passed the older woman harvesting pokeweed from the side of the path. "You can cook it," she explained, as if we had looked funny at her over our masks, "it's delicious!" so I called back an agreement on poke salad and wished her a good evening. We ourselves had soup dumplings for dinner and I have done nothing of any practical value since.I am having a difficult time with my physical embodiment at the moment, but I like this picture Rob took of me.
