Near the end of the visit, another expedition with M. (whom I've known since junior high school and very little in the intervening decades). We went to Morikami Gardens. Lunch in the cafe, walk around the garden loop, visit the museum. My perhaps insufficiently reverent take: that it's a little odd, Florida water and Florida plants being trained to a Japanese sensibility by people a long way and a number of generations from Japan.
The best part was when we sat on a bench on the bonsai island and watched turtles and koi and birds work the murky shallow water. All the wildlife was very tame. There was a Florida mottled duck. There were wonderfully patterned turtles swimming around. There was a quite astonishing bluejay, with blue and black checkerboard wings, which it turns out is commonplace everywhere except anywhere I have lived in the Western states for the past 45 years. A great blue heron came down right in front of us and waited to see something he might be able to eat (the koi were too gigantic, ducks out of his league, turtles too large and too hard of shell). Now and then a wind flexed his/her long plume-like neck and back feathers dangling down.
I managed to refrain from firing up the mifi unit right on the spot to get online and find the line of poetry which came to mind. Wallace Stevens, it turns out. Of Mere Being.
Saturday, came home. Port Angeles/Seattle/Chicago/Fort Lauderdale going. Fort Lauderdale/New Orleans/Las Vegas/Seattle/Port Angeles returning.
2 comments:
The overall impression: Port Angles is blue, Florida is green.
It's certainly true that I'm more likely to take pictures on the blue days :-) And the leaves are just coming out here. Soon will be green, I promise.
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