Notices by Compostable Spork (compostablespork@a.weirder.earth)

7.Volunteer a morning helping feed recent deportees down at the Kino Border Initiative in Nogales, Sonora so you can glimpse what it’s like

Vienbenidos vatos, you now qualify as card-carrying horny toads, desert tortoises & cactomaniacs!

5.Transplant prickly pear pads & cholla joints to stop off-road vehicles from intruding into the stinkin’ hot desert

6.Identify yrself as multilingual and non-mononational, learning to espeak Espanglish, Chingoles, Rezrap, & Transfronterizo Sonorismos

4.Confess all your past sins & propose new ones on your knees in front of the El Tiradito Shrine, & light candles in honor of Saints Lalo Guerrero, Teresita de Cabora, Forrest Shreve, John Fife, Demetria Martinez, & Jim Corbett

1. Spend out night sleeping on the desert floor out by Gila Bend between May & October to make peace with sidewinders, scorpions, tarantulas & goatheads

2.Climb high into a mesquite or ironwood tree & spend a few hours visiting with your new other-than-human neighbors

3.Go one month taking only dust baths & drinking only harvested rainwater

Advice from Brother Coyote, Your Border Crosser & Dreamer

from my friend Gary (aka Coyote)'s public facebook page https://www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=gary%20nabhan

Items to follow.

She leads me down the street, angling for the right corners, right hill to get us to the cemetery.

Hemlocks loom. The stones are worn, fallen, most dates are from the 1800s. Old names: the Hirams and Huldahs, the Eziekiahs and Azadahs. Mother. Wife. Child.

She's in a different past, one of groundhogs (who pull up the bones) deer, bunnies, birds. I let her lead me along their snowy trails, follow the scents of recent stories, while I read of the ones who passed here long ago.

#smallstories

Looking through stacks of mom's old photos. She keeps bringing out more and more, just handfuls of them, in no order.

I see mostly myself: now prom-dressed, now in diapers, with short hair, perms, braces, glasses both enormous and too small, kneesocks, Halloween costumes adorable and unfortunate, rebellious phases of extreme body hair, surprising weight fluctuations.

Mom keeps looking at herself and saying, "Oh I was so pretty and I never knew it!"

#smallstories

We've done some work with a collaborator - measuring transport activity of proteins in the vacuolar membrane in the flesh of apples. This is one of the determinants of tartness - how much acid is moved into those vacuoles.

Every year our collaborator thanks us with bags and bags of apples. New, yet unnamed varieties, bred with knowledge from scientists before us, each tree taking a decade or so to bear fruit.

Way in the future, there's a tech getting a Christmas bag of apples I helped breed.