The meadow was alive with butterflies and bees this sunny morning as Molly and I walked out. It makes you happy just to be in their midst.
There is a tall sad dead tree near Refrigerator Corner. Ivy has taken pity on it and covered its trunk and lower branches, but at the top of all this green abundance a few boughs still poke out into the sky.
This evening a gathering of tree swallows in these top-most limbs, living decorations. I could hear them chatting to one another. Perhaps it's like sitting on the deck with your family, drinking beer after a long hot day, recounting the events of work and home.
I wondered if the tree appreciated the attention, did not feel so worthless for a short while.
The little trees that all live inside with us in the cold months, dream all winter long of summer, when they get to feel the sun and the rain, when the wind ripples through their slender branches, birds perch on them and flit through them, and at night they watch the stars circle around us.
Running into the meadow late in the afternoon, I was halfway up Heartbreak Hill when I felt someone staring at me, and glanced across the field to find a deer in mid-chew, wondering what on earth I was doing, charging up the other side! I stopped dead and stared right back, at the handsome ears, the quick and brilliant eyes. But as soon as I reached for my camera she bolted, snorting and flashing her white tail at the black dog and me.
Apparently the Perseid Meteor shower is best tonight, between 12 and 4am, but there were still a few clouds and I saw none when I took Molly out a few minutes ago at 12.31.
Tim always complains about the movies I order from Netflix, because they are often really depressing indie movies, or strange foreign stories that go on and on and never seem to get anywhere. Tonight we watched one that he ordered, called Departures. He couldn't believe it came with his name on the envelope!
It's a Japanese movie about a young cellist in Tokyo who loses his job when the orchestra disintegrates from lack of funding, so he goes back to his small town where his mother who recently died had left him a house, and has to find a job. The one he happens on is that of an 'encoffiner', an undertaker, which eventually turns out to be his calling. It is a beautiful little movie, maybe a little long, but so interesting and moving. Japanese customs involving the dead are highly ritualised, and everything that is done to prepare the body for burial or cremation is done in a very beautiful way right there in front of the entire family, all the children and relatives. And at the end of the ceremony, when the undertaker has washed the body with great care and privacy, under a beautiful cloth the entire time, and then he has dressed the person, and made the face look beautiful again, each person who is there to pay their respects comes up individually and receives a little dampened cloth with which they bathe the dead one's face. It is very beautiful, and people can add their own touches, like one family of grandchildren said that she (their grandmother) wanted to wear long white socks like them, not the traditional strangely two-toed ceremonial socks.
It seems to me so much better than the western secretive way, where an undertaker does all that weird stuff like replacing the person's fluids, all alone in a little cold mortuary-type place. To have it all out in the open, to have all that time to think on that person, to bathe him or her with water, to cry the tears of grief together and alone, seems wonderful, human.
Needless to say, we were both a bit sniffy by the end of it. Although Tim always blames allergies.
This is a quick drawing of Tim watching the movie, in his inimitable pose, arms above his head, his fingers fiddling with themselves.
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