When
something nags at you as much as not blogging lately has nagged me, you have to
just sit down at do it. I know no other way. Perhaps I will get to a point
where it will no longer nag at me, and I will give it up. I know people who are
experts at dodging nags, and I almost admire them. But for right now I have to
put my butt in the chair and scratch that itch even though I fear I don’t have
much to say.
We
have been back at our India home a week today, a week of storms, both internal
and external, and today is the first warm day I have experienced here this year.
P and I stepped out of our home and into the stream in our front yard to cross
it to get to the tiny island that we have named after our dog who
died in 2011 and is buried here: Tiger Island. We took Foxy and Bhalli with us
who love splashing about in the water and running wild, Bhalli hopping like a
black doe from boulder to boulder and occasionally stopping to bite the water as
if she were drinking up the stream. P has been wearing his paint smeared shirt
he wears in his studio, as you can see from the photos.
We
were both thrilled to see that the deodars, or cedars that we planted here the
year before and last year, have all survived the goats and the cows and have
grown taller. Though we will not live long enough to see our island become a
forest of deodars (it already has a lot of pine trees and a few adolescent
cedars), because they are very slow growing, we can envision it. In fact, I am
thinking of planting more saplings up the hill on the banks of another lovely
little stream that flows into ours. I think a part of me will survive to see
them grown into adulthood through the eyes of future generations. And in a way
I have already seen them with the eyes of my imagination, tall, with feathered
branches, like wings. I am more than grateful to live with the few huge ones in
the vicinity of our homes.
I
also like to bonsai them. Here is a picture of Foxy sitting under my favorite
one.
Well,
this is a beginning. And beginnings progress. Next time, a photo of a deodar, though they are so hard to capture in a photo.
Nice to imagine the young deodars growing to maturity long after we're gone. We've planted over 150 trees in the last three years: deodars, willows, horse chestnuts--slow, long-life span trees. One day 100 years from now people will sit under their shade....
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