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Thursday, June 2, 2016

Nature talks to us through our senses


The light. On this still day the light is like a canopy of Mother Cabrini church blue. A sparrow flits from the roof to the garden. Planes pass overhead landing and leaving Lisbon making sharp contrails that linger into soft reminders. The ocean is azure blue with flecks of topaz and diamonds.

The audio soundtrack.  I perceive in stereo chittering birds calling to each other from one end of the grove of pines to the other. There's a triller. Now one that whistles. This morning we heard the grouse but could never spy them. The calls are varied. I can patch together a pattern, but it vanishes as soon as it appears. Chittering, trilling and loudest of all, insistent high-pitched scrapings from babies in their nests calling for their lunch.

Aromas. Our host gallops across the yard from the garden with a large red onion and a beet he presents for a future salad. Fresh from the earth's embrace they carry aromas born in the marriage of the garden to the sun and rain.  On our walk we passed the heated pine and inhaled the musky perfume. We retraced our steps to pause under the shade to drink in the perfume again, but it had flown away. Wild Spanish lavender, thyme, honeysuckle, other herbs unknown call out their aromas as we brush past them with our shoes, our socks and pants legs. From the stove herbs mingle with our rotisserie chicken leftovers from lunch to make new aromas predicting soups to come.

Touch. The sharp, impenetrable gorse that clumps like boulders along our path keeps all but the lizards from entering. The rocks are rough, save for the ones we saw far below us,  big as watermelons, tumbling to smoothness in the ocean's tango dance with the shore, flirting in her dress of scalloped hem.  Silty sand along the paths of our walk from our cottage to the cliffs above the ocean, sand that wizards I've never thanked in person not long ago transformed into the face of this device of ones and zeroes with which I write, my finger tip firm as it taps making corrections five times every three words  drunk as I am with pleasure.

Taste. Dark and potent coffee, water, clear and cool, fresh sheep's cheese on village made bread that your teeth have to tug at to convince admittance. 


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