A Small Brass Goat

List yo

No poems or essays or stories this week. Just gonna write a list. Perhaps it will serve as an introduction, too, if we have not met? Here's some of what I'm grateful for, in no order, this May Day, 2025:

Greyhound Bus, generally (they're nice lately, you can sleep, it's comparatively surveillance free, definitely more welcoming of the poor), and especially NOW 

This song, which I somehow never tire of playing on repeat and this song too (courtesy of Lucy's playlist)

"Wild Plums," Grace Stone Coates. Hadn't read this story in years, re-read it for Bess's class, ah: longing! Women and the feral! The pinch of judgement. Plums.

Experiencing a culture of leisure, for real, in the Bajío of México, circa now 

Guayaba ice cream, sugar cone

Growing fennel, gosh it's pretty

The pope was so good to prisoners

Husband, public school educator, getting rest

My teenagers think I am funny? 

Clara gives birth to Silvia, en caul, soft snow!

Josephine's school of Spanish: proceed w/ confidence and chicle for friends and it'll work out!

Old theaters with red curtains (got to sit in one last night)

How so many people around here just artfully kick a soccer ball back if it strays their way? 

This band, local fave

Colorways like tan with neon yellow, fuschia with muddy forest, brick orange on celery 

Tacos al vapor de papas for breakfast with pickled onions and salsa verde

Fitted sheets, and I miss them

Weirdly? Doing my own laundry by hand

My Uncle Steve, who passed this week

(The memory of my cousins, his children, fighting in Japanese in a park in Amarillo, Texas when we were little)

A small brass goat I bought for Franny as an Easter gift

Three branches of government! And, so says Lucy, who apparently knows more from 9th-grade than the POTUS knows from, for example, being POTUS? "On the whole, the framers intended for Congress to be the strongest branch, with the most power, none of them intended to have a very strong executive branch. I don't know if he was entirely right, of if I agree with this, but Alexander Hamilton thought that judiciary was, just by nature, the weakest branch of government, and the most prone to corruption. I think it's Federalist 53 but I would have to check that." 

Just heard thunder for the first time in months

Lawyers in the street

Undies drying on the balcony

Learning how to make piñatas with Bess

My sketch of a design in stone on a stairway in a local museum. Pen and daughters’ watercolors, per usual these days.