I’ve been reading all the young dudes for the first time and am absolutely obsessed. The writing is ridiculously good.
But it’s got me thinking about Regulus and Sirius’s relationship a lot. So I was looking for Black family fics, but I was having trouble finding ones that weren’t AU or like hermionie time traveling (a surprising amount of those??) anyways gonna keep looking but please hmu if you know any great Black family angst fic. I’m so into it rn
Ok, so you know cottagecore. (If you don’t know cottagecore, I completely recommend searching the tag. Your bloodpressure will lower, your airways will open and you will feel calmer than you have all week.)
But cottagecore isn’t quite right for me.
So, I propose my own ideal lifestyle aesthetic- cottagepunk. I am a city creature, born and raised. Instead of escaping to bucolic and remote settings, this is about blooming where you’re planted.
Strawberries bursting into fruit all along the sidewalk of my city home, inviting neighbors and passers by to enjoy them.
Yards full of wildflowers.
Big comfy black overalls
Swapping baked goods with the next block
Old combat boots lovingly polished while I sit on the front porch drinking tea & petting passing dogs
Trading heirloom seeds and grow-able cuttings because Monsato sucks.
Little free libraries full of books to share.
Fundraising pumpkin patch sales at the local park.
Making friends with pigeons and squirrels and raccoons and all the creatures of the city. Being delighted when less common neighbors- like my neighborhood’s current flock of turkeys- come calling.
Tapping my maple tree and sharing the syrup.
City chickens.
Despite it all, I don’t want to run from civilization. I just want to infuse it with everything growing and cozy and kind.
This is urban agriculture as I know it.
Seed swaps where people take 10 seeds out of a packet of 100 and leave the rest for someone else, and a local botanist pulls out a giant mason jar of local wildflower seeds and says, “I’m gonna pass this around, everyone take a handful.”
Google maps with hundreds of contributors, mapping the location of every tree with edible fruit on city land. Email lists that let roving bands of fruit rescuers know when there’s a harvest come ripe, half to be donated to the food banks and half for the harvesters.
Backyard nurseries growing the rogue apricots that somehow manage to survive our -40 winters, butternuts from the seeds of a single tree—it was planted here a hundred years ago as a botanical curiosity, but now that the butternut has been almost wiped out in its native range, our cold winters keep it safe.
Groups that move into culverts and drainage ditches and slowly transform them from grass monocultures to vital wetlands that protect our freeways against floods.
Historians who trace the goji berries growing wild in the river valley to the Chinatown just north of it, Chinese immigrants a century ago who terraced the riverbank for market gardens until they were chased out to make way for “wilderness” but left those perennials behind.
Indigenous elders who can take their students to a ravine two blocks from downtown and teach them about the plants here that kept their people alive for thousands of years.
Resistance and resilience grow here like dandelions in the cracks of the pavement.
Important question: whatever happened to the tlat audio book someone was trying to put together like 4 years ago? I’m still very interested. (And have been going through audio content ridiculously quickly these days)
Young girls are naturally inclined to witchcraft. You cant leave a young girl alone in the backyard for 5 minutes without her trying to make “soup” from some flower petals and sticks.
