"Bend low again, night of summer stars."

Things that are making me happy:
Tracks of French conversation from my textbook CD popping up when I shuffle my music. First of all, it's quite amusing to hear invisible people jabbering about their respective vacation plans between songs, and it's not a bad refresher, either. I'm pleasantly surprised by how much I remember.

Rereading Enna Burning. This is my third time through it , and it's been two years since the last time. It's just the right kind of reread - the text feels familiar enough that I'm able to think more deeply about it than I had before, but it's been long enough since my last read that it's not boring.

Blowing scented soap bubbles while I wait for the streetcar.

Baking after dinner to a playlist of Gregorian chants while my sister does puzzles on the kitchen table and licks the bowls and spoons.

New-to-me family history. My mother dug out an old family tree and I learned a little more about my Welsh coal miner great-great-grandfather than I knew before, and that we have some history in Salt Lake City! (Now if my parents will only fly me out there during the next LRRH convention to do some on-location family history research...;)

Gala Darling's list of 50 Things To Do Before Summer Ends, and the southern-hemisphere companion, 50 Things To Do Before Winter Ends

My sky-ceiling of glow-in-the-dark stars, complete with a moon and a dozen sheep (Why sheep? To count, of course!)

Warm pavement and Pacific glimpses

Summer Senses Meme

Tagged by Gretchen

List the things you love about summer for each of the five senses and tag five people at the end. Simple!

Taste:
Honest Tea iced tea, salt licked off my skin after an afternoon at the beach, fresh cantaloupe and strawberries and pears and pineapple, coffee drunk at beautiful San Francisco cafes, hot fresh falafel

Touch:
Warm pavement under bare feet, a wave passing under me and lifting me off the sandy bottom and up and over its crest, downhill wind on bare arms during a bike ride, a chain-link fence between my fingers, sun and breeze on my face, the gentle foamy cool end of waves pushing its way around my calves

Sight:
Sea foam floating on clear water over dark sand and the pattern that the shadows of the foam and the sunlight through the water make on the sand (does anyone else know what I'm talking about?), the ocean spreading blue and forever across a clear horizon - or glimpsed between houses, books for me on the hold shelf at the library and tall stacks of them at home on my dresser, the ground falling away under me and the sky swinging overhead when I swing, freckles, flip flop tans, strawberry pickers on street corners selling fruit straight from the fields

Smell:
Sea air, fresh cucumber and pineapple, my dance studio (I think it's the shoes)

Sound:
My aunts telling stories, my cousins laughing in the surf and shrieking as they wipe out, waves breaking, Irish dance class music

Anilee, Odessa, ennagirl, Anna, and Ashleigh - you're it.

"The Truth the Dead Know"

I love the scene in the middle stanzas of this poem - especially the images she uses to create it - and the way she doesn't seem to feel the connection between June and bravery needs an explanation. Also the feeling in the last sentence, which I can't quite put a name on yet - not just grief.

The Truth the Dead Know
For my mother, born March 1902, died March 1959,
and my father, born February 1900, died June 1959

Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape. I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch. In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely. No one's alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
in their stone boats. They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

-Anne Sexton

Lisa Chellman's hosting today's Poetry Friday round-up over at her place.

"more or less equidistantly / exiled from both, / hovering in the dreaming..."

Things that are making me happy:

lining the inside of my journal's covers with tridecalogisms and pretending their powers will protect it

the Memoirs of a Geisha film score. I'm not that crazy about the movie, but the soundtrack is by John Williams and features Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman, so of course it's gorgeous.

wearing a crown around my neighborhood on errands that would otherwise be boring

Yee Sum's continued posts from our college's summer program in England - Anglophiles, see here, here, here, and here for some of the amazing photos she's taken so far.

phone calls and letters from faraway friends

sending messages to strangers by tucking notes into library books

cupcake inspirations that keep me awake

What about you?

Like little batter melons in cupcake papers

(Oh, the joy of posting about cupcakes above a review of a book about eating disorders...;)


Watermelon cupcakes! Just red batter with chocolate chips in it, frosted green. The idea belongs to Jamieanne at The Cupcake Review, and I couldn't resist trying it for my next batch of Saturday cupcakes (new summer tradition - lovely way to occupy my Saturday afternoon, and of course my family doesn't exactly mind having a kitchen full of fresh baked goods.)

I didn't actually make them from the recipe she used, which called for watermelon flavored frosting (!). Would have, but unfortunately I didn't have the watermelon juice required to make it. Maybe next time we have watermelon around.

I made mine from the Joy of Baking vanilla cupcake recipe, plus, of course, the chocolate chips. I used vanilla soymilk instead of plain dairy milk for a little extra vanilla flavor. I'd use the recipe again; the cupcakes turned out with a very nice texture.

I decided to frost them with royal icing, an easy egg-white-and-sugar (read: no fat!) icing that hardens very quickly and is usually used for decorating. It made a delightful crunchy layer on top of the soft, warm cupcake. I couldn't persuade it to be anything darker than pastel green, though.

Feed reader users, don't miss the new poll in the sidebar - it's your chance to sound off on baking posts.