I'm back from a family trip to Orcas Island. Waiting for the ferry in Anacortes, we spotted skittering kingfishers and a great blue heron in flight--its path strangely loping. Then, in Orcas, there were the requisite cows, sheep, and horses; a buck crunching on dead leaves; and sweet doe eating dandelions. We went to the old strawberry barreling plant in the hamlet of Olga, where there are no longer any strawberry fields. And M & I baked our bones in a sauna that may have been close to 200° F. How refreshing!Now I'm in back-to-school mode. A few tidbits of note:

• On Sunday, September 18, I'm teaching a free one-day class on contemporary fairy tales at the Capitol Hill branch of the Seattle Public Library.
• On Saturday, October 22, I will be one of 40+ featured artists at Artist Trust's 30th Birthday Party. Tickets are $25 and proceeds support this amazing organization and all the hard work it does in Washington State. I have felt their impact profoundly as a recipient of their inaugural Gar LaSalle Storyteller Award. But they have been a helpful resource for me long before that; I attended a number of their grant writing workshops and compiled some of my notes in a post here.
• Finally, I'm pleased to be offering one-on-one writing coaching via Hugo House's new manuscript consultation program. You can learn all about here.

In other news, I have a few pieces forthcoming--a collage essay about a fruit (in the meantime here's a post I wrote about nectarines), a short story inspired by my recent trip to the Netherlands, and two short-short fairy tales. I'll be sure to post links to these pieces as they become available.

My third and final post about our trip to Japan.The Kobe Ropeway, I learned from Wikipedia just now, is nicknamed - quite appropriately-  the "Kobe Dreamy Balloon." Surely, it is a place where happiness is made. I took a half dozen pictures of the adorable mural beside the entrance to this aerial tramway, possibly the most cheerful mural I've ever seen. And then, silently, we zoomed 400 meters up Mount Rokkō , inside the little sleek black and red car, precariously attached to the cable by a tiny metal hook and swaying ever so slightly in the wind. Below us: lush trees, then the white-brick, gray-brick, and blue-glass city, then the glittering harbor melting into the milky horizon. Above us: the Nunobiki Herb Garden, an Alpine-style rest house, a concert hall, and a museum of fragrance. In the aromatherapy room, we made soap scented with lavender and geranium and tinted with turmeric and rosemary. Outside, snow whirled over snapdragons, white roses, a whole riot of springtime flowers. We wandered down the hill through the herb garden to a greenhouse with an exhibit on spices, smelling jars of cloves, saffron, anise, cardamom - essential, enlivening olfactory research!Out of the garden and hiking back down Mount Rokkō, we passed many tiny shrines nestled into the hillside, and a few waterfalls. J pointed out this habitat as a likely home for kappa, a mythical amphibious animal notorious for stealing cucumbers and, when provoked, ripping out livers via the anus. How incredibly specific!Here are some more pictures from the mural (click to expand):

Last week, I swooned over Tokyo's never-endingness. This week I want to tell you about tiny things.On a rainy night in Kyoto, we got lost looking for a restaurant recommended by my guidebook. (Silly me and my seven-year-old book!) We came to a lovely street, less bustling and generic than the downtown boulevard we'd been following and bisected by a canal, the yellow light of intimate restaurants illuminating the water. We poked around a few restaurants there, though the ground-floor ones seemed to cater to executives on expense accounts, and one that required taking an elevator gave off an unsettling-is-this-a-restaurant-or-not vibe, so we turned off this very-pretty-but-inaccessible street, onto an alley.We were tired, hungry, and wet.This is the first place we found:The restaurant was down a set of stairs and a sign above the stairway said "We have Yuba Food here!" J explained the yuba is tofu skin. A bearded man in a corduroy blazer rounded the corner, saw us deliberating outside, and smiled wide, encouraging us to go on in, so we took him up on it, descending the staircase and following a narrow cellar hallway to the front door. J peaked in the window. "It looks cozy," he said.It was, indeed, a tiny place, with one counter and one wooden table, which could seat about eight and at which sat two men just finishing their meal. The man in the picture (above), wearing a lab coat and a pink bowtie, greeted us and seated us at the table, telling the men already there to recommend dishes to us. We learned they were from Osaka, but regulars here. They asked if we like oysters (we do), but then went on to recommend a seasonal specialty, baby bamboo tempura.Before the food came out, the woman of the picture above, in a red headscarf and looking eerily like a Japanese version of my paternal grandmother, brought out three little ceramic dishes - an amuse-bouche of tiny raw fish in a ponzu sauce, topped with grated radish and hot sauce. The fish were not so tiny that you could not see their tiny eyes. Their silvery skin was translucent, beneath which ran a dark line from head to tail. Reader, I'm sorry that we were squeamish. The only thing to do was eat the tiny fish. J had a lot of practice with this, having lived in Japan as long as he did. We all took a big gulp of cold beer and downed the tiny raw fish with their tiny eyes and tiny intestinal lines. It couldn't be done in one bite, of course. There were lots of tiny fish in our tiny ceramic bowls. Actually, the dish was quite delicious (texture aside -- an acquired taste, I'm sure!). I got through about half. J got through about half. But M? M was resolved to eat all his many tiny fish. And eat he did! Which led to a discussion on the origin of the phrase "mad props". We ate crab wrapped in yuba and a tomato-cheese-in-a-skillet-thing, but by the far the most delectable dish was the spring vegetable tempura, which included asparagus, a "spring flower", a "tree root" (which I think was actually an exceptionally refined piece of broccoli), and the tender baby bamboo, crown jewel of the spring vegetables. Which just goes to show, always ask a local for a recommendation.Food aside, this was a neat little place. The stucco walls and the basement location made it feel like a cave whose walls had been whitewashed. A mask made of a coconut shell sat on a side table by the door and one wall was adorned with a motherboard. The music jumped from African to traditional Japanese (the koto, I think), to jazz. I felt like we were just hanging out at someone's house.I wish I could tell you exactly where this place was, but maybe the best way to experience it is to stumble upon it?

Over the holidays, while waiting for the restroom, I overheard this exchange and have been so enraptured by it (read to the end to feel the rapture) that I'm convinced at least one person, if not multiple, could write a short story, if not a novel, from this tender seedling. Please do share if you do!--"Mommy, it's not coming out.""Well," says the mother, from a neighboring stall, "you don't want to eat your fruits and veggies. That's what happens when you don't eat your fruits and veggies." Time passes. "Are you ready? Do you want my help?""Ok."The mother flushes, exits her stall. "Get out," she says, "so I can come in." A big brother, about seven or eight but large for his age, comes out, smirking. A gold earring, maybe it's a stick-on, gleams in one of his lobes. The mother enters the stall. Clucks her tongue. "Why isn't there a toilet seat cover?" She sighs, loudly."Mommy," the big brother says, face near the closing door, eyes half-closed and dreamy, "I love you."--If you liked that, here's another inter-generational overheard, in Florence: http://ancawrites.com/2006/03/30/bargello/