Lovely stuff

I know that I have an extremely nice life, a life I'm sure I don't deserve, and it's only with a hint of guilt that I write about the place I'm in, thanks to Miss Haphazard, which feels like a small town out of a movie like Pleasantville. It is early and I am in a garden filled with herbs for cooking -- anise, sage, thyme, mint, marjoram -- and flowers for cutting -- ox-eyed daisies, hydrangea, hosta, rose -- and a house that is a pristine white, with wide wood polished floorboards, and large rooms, surrounded by sycamore trees. The bed I share with Minks is huge and fat and white, with chubby pillows and a big white duvet. In front of the window is a wooden model of a tall ship, with a mast so tall I can rest my hat on it. Outside the streets are cobbled and the houses are weathered and grey-shingled with white window frames. The shops on main street have elegant wooden signs akin to those on Main Street in Disneyland. Book shops dominate, along with toggeries, bakeries, hatteries & most importantly, wineries. Tan skinned, rosy-cheeked children wearing shorts and plimsols with brown legs often marked by bug bites ride by on bikes or walk with friends, flashing big white smiles. The men look like David Hockney or Ted Kennedy, all strapping and white-haired, wearing nautical-themed polos.

Yesterday afternoon, the children splashed about on the shoal, just out from the beach, a place I noted that would be a perfect setting for a Biblical epic as people appear to be walking on water. We're all reddish brown and bright-eyed, the seaside glow I think it's called.

Our friends live in another house in the middle of conservation land, by an Audubon reserve, near a marsh and a pond that leads to the ocean. The house is surrounded by bird feeders and behind them, there are osprey nests perched like old ladies' hats on enormous poles. The sun set in strips of orange and pink over the sage grey horizon and the moon dutifully popped up on the other side of the house, a milky orb, latently full. We feasted on grilled fish and corn and fresh salsa, on watermelon with feta and mint, on blueberry pie with the thinnest crust you've ever seen, a la mode. Five little girls played together, sardines in the bushes, complete with ticks, creating huddled human stars on the lawn at sunset and scaring each other half silly as night fell and they relegated the game to a darkened room inside the house.

It is easy to sit back and watch life go on around you and not quite be present. It's Iggy Pop's Passenger, really. The alternative is conjured up in an image I have in my head from my childhood. That wonderful nature man on the BBC with the bear-like demeanor and the massive sprouting of facial hair who would dig his big, fat sausage fingers into the black, peaty soil and bring up all kind of worms and centipedes and wriggly things, and say something like "Get your hands right in there...lovely stuff." Of course I've forgotten his name. Maybe Curt will remember.

UPDATE: 10:18am EST
FROM: Coral
Answer is David Bellamy!