Bellow

July 15, 2009 6:15am

More ridiculous sunrises. This one, Edvard Munch would have painted. The golden orb and a thick, flat line of orange extending across the water which lies still as oil cloth.

Spent much of yesterday on a ladder clipping my mother's fir tree hedge, which arcs around the wooden deck in a semi-circle, so that people visiting their boats can't watch us drinking our tea and eating our halved cardamom buns with sweet brown goat's cheese. Enormously satisfying job, tree-trimming. I trained myself on the black bamboo at home and now Norwegian Christmas trees and white honeysuckle. I find I'm quite good on a ladder.

J is reading about people who escape from North Korea. "The World's Most Repressive Country" it says on the cover of the book, in large red letters. His fascination with Kim Jong-Il amuses me. I've tucked into Bellow's Herzog after hearing Jeffrey Eugenides extol its merits on NPR in May.

I notice a terrific sense of well being on this little island. One wakes up without the awareness of a floating doom that so often pervades my psyche in LA. There is a clarity and sense of fitting in, of being in sync with the world. This view, the sea, the islands, is so familiar to me and yet it changes each time I look at it. The light falls a little differently, a mist changes the color of the sea, the birds fly in and out of frame, the rolling theatre of clouds go by. Anxiety is gone and not missed.

A cow is braying plaintively. J thinks it's a moose. I guessed whale first, which probably means I'm a little too caught up in the spirit of the sea in this little coastal hamlet. I imagine Moby Dick to rise up out of the water in the sleepy harbor.

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