November bookmarks

Thank goodness, it's finally over

November is by far the busiest month of the year in my industry (because of the dread Thanksgiving). Thank goodness, thank goodness that's over and I can look forward to some time to breathe now. 

To get through the final push of this week, I decompressed with an old favorite book, one that I haven't reread in years and years - Enna Burning, by Shannon Hale. 

In a roundabout way, she is the author who got me blogging. I was part of her ferociously active little fan forum, Little Red Reading Hood (est. 2006), and a number of the girls and young women there had blogs as well whose comment sections became another way of hanging out and chatting.

What about you - do you remember who or what (if applicable) got you started blogging?

Gratitudes & things that are making me happy

 • Watching hachiya persimmons ripen on my neighbors' trees, the fruit nearly the same color as the changing leaves

• Time off work

• Rainstorms, for my fire- and drought-plagued home

• Critically, a handy neighbor able to stop my roof leaking

• And for a very rainy-day lunch: hot chocolate and grilled cheese

• Fairy tales - I've been reading slowly through the first edition of the Grimm collection

• Isn't It Romantic, the movie - lots of laughs on a recent weekday night

• The colors of the sunset reflecting in the puddles on the rooftop across the way

• New comfy work-from-home pants

• Finding nice, brand-new hiking boots in my size at a secondhand store, for under $40

• Al-Anon meetings, the kindness there and the feeling of hope and calm I receive

• Giving up on a book partway through sometimes 

• Giving up on books I own but haven't read, sometimes

• Booster shots for my girlfriend and my mom

• Juniper (our cat daughter)

• A daydream of learning to weave

Rain walk

 In honor of fall's first rains, photos from a rain walk I took in late autumn last year.

Days, lately, in photos

Hot days in a top-floor apartment = blinds down all afternoon, big fan blasting. It still reliably gets 10 degrees hotter inside than outside on those days.

Immature acorns.


A nice neighbor. I say hi to her every time I pass her yard.

Add pomegranates to the list of fruits I have seen successfully cultivated by home gardeners in my area. Another recent addition: olives!


I have taken up coloring again to keep my hands busy during team meetings on Zoom.



Our girl.

Beautiful color from the liquidambar trees.


My shady walks are becoming gradually less so...

Rosehips are ripening, and reminding me it's a good time of year for rosehip tea (a gracious source of vitamin C).

"While There's Still," by Chrystos

an edge to the parking lot

you can hear the orange gold

songs of autumn birds

bursting into dawn in an uneven

ragged line of untrimmed trees

You could

lean out

over the railing

which keeps you from it

& despite everything

breathe in the beauty

Farmers' market still life

With night falling early, my farmers' market takes place partly after dark now. Most of the farms illuminate their produce with strings of lights hanging from their canopies; this one simply put their lights on top of their produce. I loved the effect - an uncalculated but striking display that looked like the old masters would have turned it into a painting.

Thoughts of winter

First thoughts of winter, and first preparations for winter. I like this herbal remedy to aid against colds and flus. It's a tincture - a very simple way to extract certain properties in alcohol.

The herbs looked so beautiful, with the mixture of flowers and berries and leaves looking like sand art, that I needed to take  a picture before I filled the jar the rest of the way with vodka.

Here's the recipe. I added lemon balm and thyme, increased the quantities of ginger and orange peel, and left out the honey.

Scone dough

What we did with the raspberries (the ones we didn't eat right off the bush). I actually did not get to taste these; while they were still in the oven the time came to hug my friend's mom goodbye and get in the car for Anna to drive me to the airport. But I heard they were good, and that they got fed to a social worker.

November hours

Designer drugs

"I don't take drugs; I am drugs." – Salvador Dali

Two a.m. showers in the dark are my favorite now. In the dark means, by the light that comes in the bathroom window from the suburban night sky (a hazy pinkish-gray).

As my hair is drying I open an umbrella the color of that sky and pad barefoot out to the middle of the backyard lawn. From above, no one would be able to see me.

A thin November rain throughout the night, so I keep my windows open to the cold for the sake of its sound on the remaining leaves. (Are the yellow ones always the last to fall? Plastering the pavement, striking in the streetlights...)

I smell like incense.

October weekend

Watchful of the shifting days

I've never had a desk in front of a window before. I do now, for the next eight weeks, and it's where I'm sitting now, looking out over the backyard. Some trees are still full-green, but the lawn has a good cover of dry fallen leaves. It makes me remember the storm that was supposed to be Hurricane Irene — my Boston friend's lawn littered afterwards as if with a sudden green autumn.

I'm back at college for my very last six credits. Anthropology of global Christianity, a German independent study on expatriate memoirs, and public speaking. It's a little lonely right now, but I'm glad to be here. Challah and microwave tea and waiting for my classes to start (tomorrow).

There is less bitter in my bittersweet this autumn. Less dread. I will be able to savor the interval that straddles late fall/early winter, a tremendously evocative time, but with the knowledge that I am free to depart to coastal California before the deep, teethy part of winter descends. It's a bit cheating, to want the moods of October and November and December without the expectation of the full length and dark of winter, without the prospect of digging in and waiting until the cold lifts of its own (grudgingly, gray-and-muddily). But the Chicago winters have taken enough from me; we can call it even.

I know it's traditionally polite and superficial to talk about the weather, but I would do it for the pleasure and interest of it. For all that modern houses and cars and supermarkets insulate us from what seasons and weather have meant to most of humanity for most of our history,  it's still impossible not to notice or be affected by them (we are still human animals). They anchor me in the present — through my senses, for better or worse/lighter or darker — even while my thoughts swim in and out of reflection and memories. And keep reminding me that time is more spiral than linear — directional, but cyclical, to paraphrase a Madeleine L'Engle character. Every autumn I am swinging back around past every other autumn I've had, close enough to reach out and graze them with my fingers.

Ohio, part three: burying ground

Part the last. The direct morning light was too bright for the film in my camera.

Speaking of film, I am about an hour from catching my train to my plane to California for Christmas break, and I have my flatbed scanner (the one that scans negatives) in my one piece of luggage, the carry-on...haha. I don't want to pay other people to scan my film for me when I have my own, and it's not like I can wait three weeks to see what my developed negatives are OF.

A still November day

The air felt pleasingly moist, and I saw no one else.

How I spent my Halloween

So in love with...all this doing. The fulfillment of the waiting between the picture and the negatives returning to my mailbox. It's going to make my heart burst. I need more black and white, I need more of this fast film. More dreaming walks all the winter long, with my thoughts in my feet and my viewfinder. Everywhere.