unfinished sketch of cicada

photo and drawing: jetheriot

the flavor of wild persimmon

photo: jetheriot

Big apples come from small apples. That’s how it works. The apples you find in grocery stores today haven’t always been so large. Go back two thousand years and imagine a fruit market in Mesopotamia. See how the apples were so much smaller then? Go back four thousand more years and imagine a primitive apple tree in a spontaneously flowering orchard. See how the wild apples are even smaller than the Mesopotamian ones? Now fast forward to a supermarket today. The apples are jumbo. Small wild apples, over millennia of cultivation, have become large domesticated apples. “This is the way of all fruit,” I thought to myself, pinching a small wild persimmon I nearly stepped on moments earlier.

autumn morning glory

photo: jetheriot

autumn wildflowers

photo: jetheriot

Come October, wildflower season is over, or so we tell ourselves, never noticing the lavender wildflowers all around us.



i dreamed this last night

photo: jetheriot

door prize

photo: jetheriot

The whole football fits pleasurably in the cupped palm of my hand. It’s a tiny football made from foam, smaller and lighter than an actual football, stamped with orientaltrading.com and MADE IN CHINA. It’s elongated and slightly pointed like an uncracked pecan, larger than a pecan but not heavier than one. Four quadrants are defined by two thin gutters ribboning the foam surface of the football lengthwise, perpendicularly oriented ovaloid grooves tracing a pair of smooth paths through the roughness of the grip, independent equators criss-crossing at the two tips of the ball. Grip. That’s what they call it: the pebble-grain texture on the surface of footballs and basketballs and other objects designed to be held by hands. It’s a kind of grit, a bubble-pimple pattern on the basketball or football that enhances its grippability. Gripping is what the hand does to the grip of a ball. Gripping is what the hand does to the grip of a handle.

a book is a toy you read

This is the chapter of the book I originally set aside to tell you about how reading is like playing with a toy, how books are like toys you play with by reading, but when Andrew, having just returned to Houston from a visit to his home in England, handed me a treasury of fairy tales he used to love to read as a child, now battered and falling apart, missing its first thirty-four pages, colored with pencil and crayon marks, its spine completely collapsed, its remaining tattered pages barely holding together, I decided to just describe in words the scrawlings I found in that book, and use that for the chapter instead.