ada_hoffmann

For MerMay, leecetheartist did me the great honor of using me as a model for a glittering mermaid.



After the hectic bloom of mid-week summer, the weather has crashed back into overcast, rain, and intermittently raw chill. The Bradford pear directly in front of my office window has been hedged around with sawhorses declaring it a threat to public safety and scheduled for removal next week. I was photographing its delicately clustering blossoms just a few weeks ago. It's full of green leaves. It hasn't been antisocial to me. asakiyume sent me Thao & The Get Down Stay Down's "Temple" (2020).

Thanks to the escalation in their heartbreakingly necessary work of bonding out people kidnapped and imprisoned by ICE and helping with their legal fees and families, the Boston Immigration Justice Accompaniment Network has depleted its bond fund in record time since the start of the year. There is no shortage of detainees in our profitably carceral system and no one in need should have more locks across their path. You got a sixpence you want, they are taking donations. It's actually Shavuos at the moment, but it is always a good time to open the door to the stranger.

The green salt smell of the sea and the tidal marshes flooded in as soon as I rolled down the windows on Route 133. On impulse and antidote to my surfeit of doctors' appointments this week, spatch drove me out to Gloucester this afternoon. The clouds were stacked over the water like cyanotypes. We looped the dunes of the Boston Sand and Gravel Company and clattered through the industrial green trusses of the Tobin which currently seem to have been mummy-swaddled in tarps and chopsticks and filled out our summer's alphabet of states during slow traffic on Route 1. The Causeway discovered it had run out of fried smelts right after it had rung me up for an order and offered me fried cod cheeks instead, sweet solid dollops of whitefish which I ate across the picnic table from Rob and his steak-sized baked haddock at Stage Fort Park where local teenagers were sunbathing to music atop Tablet Rock. From the Avalonian granite of Half Moon Beach, we watched a duffel-green trawler chug in past the automated blinks of Eastern Point and Ten Pound Lights, one tower as red-and-white as a buoy, the other black-and-white as the common eiders bobbing across the glaze-blue bands of the waves. We saw cormorants in flight and fishing. We saw gulls balanced like balsa wood on the summering air. I tore my hand on some barnacles and the wind snarled my hair from all directions. When the light started to drain off toward sunset, we left by Route 127 just to see what its coastal views looked like when not obliterated by thunder-sheet rain and meandered somewhat after Manchester-by-the-Sea such that I remember admiring the whale-blue mural of a wave Hokusai-bubbling across the side of the Swampscott Department of Public Works and hoping that Prides Crossing is besieged in June. The neat white crescent of the moon came out in the ink-washed after-sunset and presently we collected ice cream from a slammed CB Scoops. I am not yet done with doctors for the week and this was an even more restoring break than walking by the Charles or North Point Park. My CD of Quinquis' eor (2025) arrived in the mail.

Hestia sniffed my hands all over, but after some proprietary headbutting allowed herself to be petted with insistent slinks of her back and escalating purr. I had met two strange cats this evening at skygiants and genarti's.

We did not actually watch one of the several productions of As You Like It in skygiants' possession, the notional goal of the hangout. We ate a bounty of deli from Mamaleh's—the bagel with chopped liver was successfully foraged despite the ravages of commencement weekend—and got as far as watching a 26-minute stop-motion Twelfth Night with a voice cast to die for, which turned out to be one of the Shakespeare: The Animated Tales (1992–94) adapted by Leon Garfield which I had been recommended last month. Then we were diverted by talking about books mostly of our childhoods and in the process I learned that prior to launching his nowadays much more famous career as a Nesbit-inspired children's fantasist, Edward Eager was a dramatist and lyricist responsible among other musical comedies for the Offenbach-in-English To Hell with Orpheus. It never seems to have made it to Broadway, but was one-shot premiered in 1953 by the irresistibly named St. John Terrell's Music Circus of Lambertville, NJ. I am captivated by this fact. I was also captivated by the strange cats, although Mina jinked out of any room I entered until very near the end of the evening, when she permitted me to stroke her very soft tuxedo-black head for about ten seconds before she headed for the refuge of the bedroom closet. So long as I didn't tower over him, Mr. Dash was more than content for me to attend to the covert white splash of his belly and his plush void back, although he seemed disappointed that leading me through the kitchen with a succession of soulful looks did not produce my feeding him. I had an out-of-season latke. It was an incredibly nice time.

genarti had made me a cup with the Uffington White Horse.

The sun came out just in time to set and I caught a handful of pictures in its gold flare of light, mostly lilacs and shadows.

( Dyna oedd yr awel, hwn yw y corwynt. )

I baked cornbread tonight with dinner, which I may not have done for a year. I had wanted some for weeks. Any time things could get easier, just for the hell of it.