Haibun : strange bird

soaring pelicans
now encircling an odd bird
leave your ties, fly free!

haiku by M. Nakazato LaFreniere

Capitola beach.  Same day.

Lori brings wine and tea to share with the group.  A blanket.  Vanilla wafers, memories of childhood. We all gather round to sip, chat. Windy here.  I was warned to bring a jacket to the beach but hadn’t packed one.  This Arizona person didn’t remember how cold California beaches could get in summer.

Lying on my back, shooting photograph after photograph of the birds wheeling high above me.  Blue skies.

Lori walks down the beach with her teen daughter, catching up after two weeks away.  Her first trip, a humanitarian vacation to Central America, Amigos de las Americas.  Adulthood on the horizon.  The initial tentative stages of letting go. Today reattaching, happy for the family ties. Sis will be home soon from her own adventures.

Looking at my photos later.  Never realized one of the birds was a kite, so far away, it had looked like a black bird silhouette.  On my screen, I see the pelicans soaring near that strange bird, its colors vibrant on my monitor.  I wonder what pelicans thought of the the tie that bound their odd companion to the earth below.

I’m home now, surprised at how Arizona has entwined itself into me, reattaching like jumping cactus on jeans.  Prickly and odd but it’s home.


 

I may be continuing to post photographs from my California trip and writing like I am still there.  I’ve always loved travelogues, the haibun style and Basho’s writings as he wandered Japan.  So I want to blend the forms with my photographs to create haiku/senryu haibun travelogues.  Not as short as the single paragraph that Basho favored but 3 to 5 paragraphs.

I want to do a road trip like Basho but with a car in the United States.  I see a couple of problems.  Looks down.  Yeah, cats.  I have faced the fact that I cannot take them with me.  Plus I have a home that needs a lot of work and has stuff so not really comfortable with renting it.  Maybe finding a roommate so I can leave the cats with them.  Which means repairing, cleaning and rearranging a lot of stuff.  So I am going to work on the house so that I can get a roommate who likes Pinkie and Midnight and is trustworthy.  I want to hit the road before the end of the year so there’s a lot to be done.

Capitola Beach

Lori Kay (my friend is also an amazing sculptor and artist)

RDP #76 – FREEDOM
Curious Cat
RDP #77 – ENCIRCLE
Reflections of an Untidy Mind
Ragtag Community
The Ragtag Daily Prompt now has it’s own blog site called the “Ragtag Community“.  Each day of the week a prompt is presented by a different person.  You can post writing or images evoked by the word and add your pingback or link to the comments.  Hope to see you there!

photograph and writing, M. LaFreniere, all rights reserved

Font: Bonnie & Lary by Mellow Lab Designs.  If you’re into pretty fonts, I bought it on Creative Market.  You can get it singly but I bought the 147 in 1 bundle which had it and a bunch of other cool fonts.  Something to note if you’re thinking of using it commercially like for the cover of your ebook, while Creative Market shows it as a Standard License which limits commercial use to 500 units sold, the designer says “unlimited projects” and “unlimited end products” which means you are not limited to 500 units.  Yeah, I know.  We can only hope our ebooks will sell 500 copies. Most of the font designers make it unlimited projects/end products to expand the Standard License agreement.  For personal use like blogging, the standard license allows unlimited.

FYI: Every Monday Creative Market gives out one or two free fonts as well as four other things like vector drawings or instagram templates and best of all is free to join.  The freebies ranges a lot.  Like this week, their six giveaways were 2 fonts, a resume template, a powerpoint template, icons, and brushes for procreate.  Since I love freebies, that’s why I joined initially. Now I am also a Creative Market affiliate so if you buy on the site after clicking the link, I get a commission but mostly I just do the freebies.

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