Sun today and the doors are left open. I can almost watch the grass grow up underneath the cherry blossoms. Dot loves running in the long grass, every time she tries to take a corner she tumbles and rolls in the grass. Today is the first time that the day welcomes both the mind and the body out into the world.
Lovely, lovely, if I were as young and dopey as Dot I’d be running and rolling in the grass. My skull actually feels larger today. Jan printed out a draft of her revised edition of her Ed Ricketts book and took it down to Nancy Ricketts. It is due at the printer soon and will be ready for sale by summer. We had hoped to be selling to the cruise ship passengers this spring and summer but there will be no rush for that. We have a few requests already and people at schools are looking forward to it, Jan is happy. Though she tripped on a wrinkle in the carpet and fell today and bloodied her nose a bit, but even that couldn’t put her off her good mood. Now she is throwing the ball for Dot and talking with our neighbor from a respectful distance, while Dot chases, rolls and leaps, and sometimes she even returns the ball… but she is not as reliable as a Labrador.
I spent a good part of the day trying to upload music onto Nancy Ricketts little iPod. Nancy, like her father favors religious music. She said her faith travels to her spirit not through her intellect or through any kind of intellectual expression of belief, but through sacred music. I think she simply feels God in beautiful music. She love Gregorian chants, and recorder music, ancient lute compositions, and choral music. Once on the radio she heard the white gospel singer Frank Newsome being interviewed and singing solo without accompaniment. She loved the sound and had to have some of it. Well her little player is a tricky little beast, and it is old, and my computer is old, but I finally was able to buy an album of Frank Newsome as well as a live recording of Aretha Franklin’s Gospel service which was made into a documentary film. Beautiful. I finally got both albums loaded and the iPod back set to the “easy play” settings with the volume adjusted so that Nancy should be able to listen to them without much frustration. (but I’m not sure…. all those little devices can be cause for frustration, but I made sure there were large print instructions along with)
Sacred music… any beautiful music makes me want to roll in the grass. I agree with Nancy I think that beautiful music makes me feel a little bit the way I felt today… a little sun drunk… as if the inside of my head is growing larger and larger, and I’m a bit dizzy just being in the sun. Intoxicating after so much rain and cold.
Cherry blossom on the grass
Just as music must be intoxicating after so much drone and silence of too much of your own company. How lucky we are to have such good fidelity of sound reproduction in our lives in this day and age. My parents loved music, but we had scratchy old records when I was a kid, but we never complained. They seemed spectacular at the time. I suppose our imagination filled in the sound of the old seventy-eights even. Something about the scratchiness gave them a mood and atmosphere that accompanied the music of the time, somehow. The real beauty, I suppose, was something from the spirit, that the old scratchy record machine just cued up inside of us. Just as the sunlight and cherry blossoms of this afternoon, simply evoked something in me today, which might not have done anything to someone raised in the south of France or the Gulf of Mexico. It would have seemed frigid to them, but I was sun drunk and giddy today.
The Red Alder tree has finally leafed out.
The seas were flat calm all day long As peaceful as a nap in a hammock. It could be possible that high pressure itself effects our mood for the better. It may have only been 57 degrees today but I saw children wading into the ocean in spots, the ocean water I’m sure is in the mid forties. Something is certainly making everyone giddy. Tomorrow pretty teenage girls will have bright red patches of skin on the back of their legs where they were laying out on the grass today reading movie magazines, or more likely sheltering under a towel and looking at their phone. When the sun shines in the rain forest we are bound to act giddy and strange to others. But I will take it, and I don’t care a whit what others think. I will role in the grass with Dot and enjoy the smell of cut grass on my old pants. The pandemic cannot take this pleasure away.
Ripe as a fresh orange
I laugh while rolling in the grass.
Black dog stares, head cocked.
jhs
Here is another recording I made with Dot sitting outside today, reading the ending of Cold Water Burning while I was a little sun drunk.
