June 18, Friday evening -- Reading Kevin Danaher, Shannon Biggs, and Jason Mark

Leaning against her bike on a sunny, but blustery Friday evening
Reading a book with these crazy green beany things that look like they can be plugged in: Building the Green Economy: Success Stories from the Grass Roots, by Kevin Danaher, Shannon Biggs, and Jason Mark. It's a collection of essays about how activists have protected their communities. She had started reading it before a job interview at Global Exchange's fair trade store -- that store on 24th Street that has all sorts of stuff from the world. Global Exchange is an international human rights organization. She got the job, is loving the book, and, I think, is on her way home from work.

Something else good she read recently -- a poetic book about gardening called Cultivating Delight, by Diane Ackerman.

The book that got her reading as a kid -- Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, by Judi and Ron Barrett, in which, in a town called Chewandswallow, it rained meals.

If she had a year on a desert island to write a book? "These are hard questions!" she said, but answered anyway. She'd create a cookbook with recipes for foraging on whatever island she was on.

Because neither of us had an inclination to forage in the general area -- the shopping cart, despite the Trader Joe's bag, looked bereft of healthy choices, and because it wasn't going to rain meatballs and because the green beany things on her book cover were making me hungry -- we, despite more bookish and grass roots things there were to chew on, parted ways, me to the grocery.