I have had a lovely birthday! Thank you so much for your birthday wishes and other beautiful things, which I will respond to as soon as I can!
We had perfect weather, sunny and breezy with mixed clouds and sun, not too hot or cold. We drove to Nenana, an old riverboat town (now mostly without the riverboats) a little over an hour's drive south of here, which we've never actually explored. It turns out there's very little to explore, but the old houses are interesting to look at, and we looked at a
fish wheel (from a respectful distance, as it's private property and someone's livelihood), got excellent sandwiches from a cafe and ate them sitting on the Subaru's tailgate by the river.
Then we came home, I ate birthday brownies and wrote on my romance novel and then we walked to the nearby beaver pond in the dusk and heard beavers calling to each other. I didn't even know beavers make vocalizations; this is the first time I've ever heard them. It was an adult calling to a baby, and we thought at first it might be a duck (we couldn't see clearly through the brush, and weren't sure the beaver was what was making that noise) - until we saw the baby (so tiny! so round! so SMOL) clamber over a mudbar and swim to catch up.
Here is a Youtube recording of what beavers sound like. The "wah, wah!" sound is just what we heard.
And you need to read the glorious Falcon & Winter Soldier birthday gift fic that
sovay wrote for me!
Longing, Rusted, Seventeen (Falcon & Winter Soldier, 1900 words, Bucky & Sam & Sarah + Zemo's unseen presence)
If he kept his combat face on, Bucky could make himself believe it looked like nothing much, lying on the cream-scrubbed deck of the Paul & Darlene in the salt-clean morning sun: a red book with a black star, about the size of the composition books of his school days, far too many wars ago.
It is lovely - the vivid setting, the characters, the complex relationships these people have with each other, and the book with 70 years' weight of personal history and trauma in it. I loved every bit of it.
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