various happenings and adventures

i danced and danced in the rain the other day. a visit to k-w, and a storm. the clouds were screaming that i must dance as they would, bathed in our collective sweat, feet bare, hair plastered to my feverish forhead. so i left the dog to her quivering at the ruckus, peeled off most of my layers, and scampered out to the frothing street to be alone in public.

i dominated a dinner party that the octagenarians were hosting with loud talk and politics, reminding myself of my father once again.

we found a lovely patch of cattails - common and thin-leaved and i shook their yellow pollen into a plastic bag and carried it all home from the k-w trail for to bake it into something tasty. and we've been eating many treats from the forests of thunder bay-hey! forests and lawns, that is. lots of dandelions: their young leaves in salad, their young buds fried in lemon-butter sauce, their flowers in pancakes... fiddle-de-diddle heads gathered from the swampy woods which we fed to our friends and hoped that nursing mother and the wee child wouldn't swap their proud, firm poos for something softer. cattail corn-on-the-cob was lovely, especially the boy-bits (at the top - best picked when still swaddled in their papery husk-like shells). painstakingly candied marsh violets. and then those treats gathered but not eaten: marsh marigolds; rock tripe.

our tri-state (minnesota, wisconsin, michigan) and tri-lake (superior, michigan, huron) tour was a fun, if sweltering drive back to southern climes and claire's wedding. swam naked in only 2 of the 3 (and not at all at the wedding, alas), bespectacling ourselves in good doctorly form.

i learned to knit. made an (ug.) hat for me (well, i pretended it would be for steve, but not very convincingly). and then a super-cute little hat for a babe yet unborn. knitting is fun! and kind of addictive. i've found myself wrapping yarn around cold little metal sticks in the wee hours of several mornings already.

of course i worked, and learned all sorts of things about cancer and such, but that's for another day or another page perhaps.

and all this while i've been playing games and laughing and walking and kite-flying and frying fish and garage-saleing and working and learning and making merry and yet no words have been written at all. not a line of haiku, not a paragraph of drivel, not a line of impationed notes on the projects buzzing across my brain. how odd the effect of connected company!