Northern New England

 

A diary entry from a week ago:

Yesterday was sunny and I lay on my back on a warm rock near one of those big perfect maple trees that grow alone near houses. The sun was so bright against the white New England clapboards it made my eyes water. Above me were lazy summer clouds and high, high up, swallows playing in the wind. The air smelled like lilacs and grass; redwing blackbirds argued in the trees and a solitary cricket sang under the porch. It was as if my former life were colliding with the present one: all the sensory impressions were as familiar and readable as my own skin, while my actual self seemed to be elsewhere. I felt like a ghost.

Comments

[Hattie]

Strange,isn't it.

[peter]

This just seems to fit, though I'm likely not to be the first to think of it:

Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness;
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find,
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas;
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.

Andrew Marvell At http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173948

[Roderick Robinson]

Ah, so literary, although redwing blackbirds sound like creatures who took a wrong turn during assembly. Me, I'm grinding, just like the mills of God. Exceeding slow. Correcting, editing, re-writing - the car mechanic equivalent of fitting a new muffler. Recognising what's wrong and hoping to rectify it. Flies dive-bomb my aged Compaq netbook and the sun is, I am glad to see, rising in the east. Technically I'm on holiday in the Languedoc but looking on you'd hardly notice the difference. Are you in fact at one of Three Places in New England, the ones Ives identifies, especially the one with the very odd river name: Housatonic. Sounds rather NASA to me.

Note the odd extension on my website address.