I’m contemplating the shadows on the concrete behind the building and suddenly notice the delivery guy with the huge boxes has stopped to contemplate me. The afternoon light makes perfect subjects of all three of us.
Sometimes the afternoon feels empty and comfortably flat. The warm, dry feeling of another day elapsing. Things look what they look like but don’t have any particular goodness or badness about them. No meaning to a blackened window in an abandoned white wall.
This is one of my favorite blocks in this little town: public pool on one end, followed by a yoga studio, Chesebro Heating & Plumbing, and an artsy furniture shop. There’s an empty lot across the street. And on spring days like today there are chairs sunning themselves on the sidewalk.
I wonder how I became the kind of person that has macrobiotic Mu #16 tea and quinoa for breakfast. Seems eccentric. But even sillier is that I really like it.
Sun breaks through the monsoon-style rains for ten minutes of smoldering, greenhouse heat to illuminate the backs of farmers planting more rice in their watery fields. No amount of hazy heat or drowning rain seem to be able to deviate the perfectly uniform rows of seedlings rolling out of the farmers hands and into the glistening mud.
Apparently every village has a palace. And this palace has a parking lot behind the gated wall. There are a few cars parked around, and at least one that seems like it hasn’t been moved for a long time.
Morning offerings of flowers, incense and food turn up anywhere- other than the family shrine, no one place seems to be any more or less special than any other for making offerings. The middle of the sidewalk, the dashboard of the car, the corner of the garden or the edge of the koi pond seem each arbitrarily and intuitively worthy.
Just a quick lunch on the front patio in the bright noon sun leaves me seeing in cutouts of glare and shadow. My takeout looks like its been photoshopped.
Tomorrow it’s supposed to snow a foot or more, but today the sun bleached air is hot and fierce, and the cloudless, autumn colors burn my retina.