scrubjayspeaks

Have you grown frustrated by all the tracking and data mining, impossible to opt out of, being done by your digital devices and accounts, but you’re not ready to take the leap of becoming a wood hermit to escape it? Consider the advantages of letting one of the many types of modern fae, who have embraced rare earth minerals as they once shunned cold iron, have unfiltered access to your data as well. Within a week, their mischief will have turned your algorithms into a mess of butter-churning videos, pranks to play on your cattle, avant-garde fashion, and increasingly obscure true crime accounts, rendering you useless--or at least unsettling--to all those advertisers monitoring you.

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LL#1256

Is your saxophone feeling soulless, or your mandolin mundane? Consider investing in routine instrument attunement to keep it raising the dead to dance and playing forbidden reels good enough to impress Old Scratch. Even the most repetitive practice by the most novice of musicians becomes compelling when ghosts and beasts might join in harmony, so have your instrument attuned to something new today.

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LL#1250

The Big Softies Club is a makers club for large gentlemen with tender hearts and crafty hands, specializing in plush toys. They are conducting a membership drive to bolster their spring/summer project, which is creating small plush companions for children who will be starting school in the fall for the first time and need extra support. As always, there is special emphasis on local fauna, so check out their next meeting with your ideas and questions for crocheted cryptids and felted figments.

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LL#1244

Thanks to a generous donation from Wonderland Farms, we have a new planting of flowering bulbs and annuals around the Buried Gardens, which will refresh some of the more faded sections around the fountain. Of particular note are the bubble hyacinths, a new hybrid developed by Wonderland Farms, which bloom into iridescent soap bubbles that gradually swell and break free of the stem. We appreciate our volunteer gardening team, who spent several weekends learning to handle the delicate bulbs and dealing with pruned fingertips.

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LL#1238

A new long-distance bus route has been established to serve those working in the abandoned wood mill north of town, and schedule and fare information is available through the library. The abandoned mill, which sits on the edge of Lewisia-influenced territory, has recently been reactivated in response to outside attempts to develop the area into an industrial park. The mill and its employees are hard at work causing the sort of mishaps and rumors that imply an area is haunted, protected by the fae, or generating mysterious frequencies and rays, in the hopes of driving off this attempted attack on our wild edges.

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LL#1232

Chimera’s Feed and Pet announces that this year’s preorders for chicks, ducklings, and other hatchlings have arrived for pickup, except for all varieties of pygmy dragon (which need to wait for warmer weather). If you did not preorder but would like to start or expand your flock this spring, there will be a selection of assorted bird and bird-adjacent creatures available in-store. We would especially like to move our stock of the new “Katana” breed of guard hummingbirds, which escaped their original coop and decimated our billing department’s paper copies over the weekend.

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LL#1226

Lewisia welcomes back all citizens and inhabitants who have been hibernating, and we would like to offer some reminders for easing your reintegration into the waking world. It is critical in these early days to reestablish the connection between your mind and body, as with any long-term consciousness alteration, so eat wholesome and delicious foods, limber up with gentle stretches, and spend plenty of time observing the sensory details of your surroundings. The wider world has waited this long for your return--it can wait a little longer while you get up to speed at your own pace.

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LL#1220

To those not yet come to Lewisia: we are here, and we will find each other somehow. There will be signposts, and fliers calling together the like-minded, and meaningful glances from peculiar strangers, all pointing you toward a safe haven. There will be no iron fences or razor wire moats around us when you get here; no gatekeeper will ask for papers, approvals, or proofs of purchase.

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LL#1214

For those wishing to learn a language this year, we recommend the new class offered by the library in collaboration with the Buried Gardens: the language of flowers. Not to be confused with the Victorian symbolic system of the same name, this class will introduce you to the basics of communication with spring ephemerals, hardy annuals, and soft perennials, from seasonally appropriate greetings to warnings about lawnmowers and burrowing rodents. For those with greater patience and more time to dedicate, we are developing a course on communication with trees to come later this year.

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LL#1208

There will be an informal gathering in the library cozy room to brainstorm amusing band names, with snacks and drinks provided via potluck. All suggested names will be up for use by anyone attending, so please plan to share freely. While names garnered from prophetic dreams, parallel universes, or past life memories are not forbidden, we do ask that you share the provenance in such cases.

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LL#1202