Simply Beautiful

Amid tall grasses,

sunset glancing over

its stalwart beauty ~

at rest when there was 

still work to be done.

“The core of beauty is simplicity.”

~ Albert Einstein

Summer’s Eve

Heat softened into evening

 city alive with summer

echoes of quiet conversations

“Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer”

~ Sam Cooke

Weather Watch

Out of a sudden wind to recover

The sun 

has yet to reach its 

zenith, shaded by a tree, my 

coffee’s barely lukewarm and 

will not grow cold today. 

Already flies are directionless, 

lazy. Barely a breeze ruffles the 

leaves without a refreshing caress. 

My potato plant wilts in the 

morning heat, full sun still to drain

water from its leaves. Muffled thunder 

merely suggests respite from rain; 

a passing puff of white scatters 

a dozen raindrops here and there

In the chill

of a coffee shop, chatter avoids 

talk of the weather, the heat, when 

it will change, when walking quickly

is safe, but grandchildren, movies, history 

food, anything but the heat that stifles 

conversations and one step at a time.

“Weather forecast for tonight: dark.”

~ George Carlin

Searching for Words

Thoughts march behind my eyes like little wooden soldiers waiting to be given their marching orders. When the Muse does not speak up, 

they keep marching into the gray oblivion of my tired brain disappearing one by one until all that can be heard is the echo of little wooden feet.

“I like good strong words that mean something.”

~ Louisa May Alcott (from Little Women)

Changes in Time

Studied, circular ~ an arrangement of our lives with the arc of the sun in cloudy or clear we walk or run through man-made calendar days, our shadows falling behind or before us keeping pace with our footprints as the sun 

 slips from our view 

  sharing its light, ray by ray,

   with the rest if the world.

“The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.”

~ John F. Kennedy

A Subjective Change

Topical issues are only a flowery surface 

in beeps and bytes ~ to get to the roots 

below the rhetorical chatter we have to get our hands dirty, get out the spade and the hoe, or stay home and enjoy the flowers. I’ve seldom been a very successful gardener, and never a politician but I do have opinions that are just that ~ opinions for a round of kitchen table discussion that drains the coffee pot and chews the fat of an evening unless someone changes the subject to something shallow like the fanciful Oscars fashions, the latest Iron Man movie or a Margaret Atwood novel favoured by a salesperson. That’s when the discussion gets seriously hilarious, 

clearing the kitchen table of any crumbs of topical issues.

“‘You is trying to change the subject,’ the Giant said sternly. ‘We is 

having an interesting babblement about the taste of the human bean.”

~ Roald Dahl, The BFG

Update: Book Review - The Garden of Evening Mists

Update: 

Humdrum, mundane  ~ two words that do not fit with this beautiful story. My second read of this story is fraught with the realities of war. I really didn’t want it to end, reading each page as a treasure. There is history in this story relating to the war between China and Japan. The tensions between Judge Teoh, and Aritomo, the gardener, because of the cruelties of the war, slowed their precious love story.

~~~~~

Original: September 2016

From the first page, the beautiful writing drew me into this story. The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng opened our new season at my book group. What a wonderful read. The story opens in Malaysia as Judge Teoh is taking an early retirement from the bench in Kuala Lumpur. Returning to the Cameron Mountains, she plans to go Yugiri, the Garden of Evening Mists. She reunites with Frederick Pretronis on Majuba Tea Estates neighbouring Yugiri. 

Judge Yun Ling Teoh is returning to the Garden to recover her past and honour her sister. They had both been in a Japanese internment camp when she was nineteen and was the only surviving member of this brutal camp. Later she was a research clerk in the War Crimes Tribunal while waiting admission to law school at Cambridge University in 1949. Her early retirement was prompted by early signs of dementia. Yun Ling begins to write her memories that span forty years from World War II through the early 1950’s and into the 1980’s before they are lost to her.

Yun Ling’s story unfolds in layers of present and past, much like the layers in the Japanese gardens that she and her sister loved. The memory of the gardens that kept them alive in the camp. Yugiri was designed and cared for by Arimoto, who was once the gardener to the Japanese emperor.  Yun Ling, despite her hatred of all Japanese, determined to keep her promise to her sister to create a Japanese garden.

Spontaneity in her life was as contrived as the outlines of Yurigi, whose stone placements, foliage and pathways were designed and placed with thought only to the image. Beneath the surface of the present images designed to deceive, lay feelings of hatred, anger, and the guilt that only a survivor knows. The principle of shakkei or borrowed scenery, the use of nearby or distant landscapes, including the sky, is used in Japanese gardening. This principle seems to be a part of Yun Ling’s whole story. The past, the present and memory all shaped her story without intent.

Winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize, The Garden of Evening Mists is a book I will read again.

“Memory is like patches of sunlight in an overcast valley, 

shifting with the movement of the clouds. Now and then 

the light will fall on a particular point in time, illuminating it 

for a moment before the wind seals up the gap, 

and the world is in shadows again.”

~ Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

Title:  The Garden of Evening Mists

Author:  Tan Twan Eng

Publisher: Weinstein Books

Publication Date: 2012

Format:  Soft Cover

ISBN: 978-1-60286-180-0 (pbk.)

ISBN: 978-1-60286-181-7 (e-book)

Type:  Fiction