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This afternoon, after I'd spent some time working up a good sweat pulling weeds, from out of the heart of the vast silence that pervades the house when everyone else is off working or whatever, Echo and I went down to the sandy beach there in the elbow of Matsunoura and jumped in the water and floated there in the cool blue with the green mountains watching, and all along the far shores of the Lake from northwest to south the sky was absolutely stacked with backed-up thunderheads waiting in line to get to Kyoto, flashing their lightning on the land below, thundering through the sunshine to us across the Lake, reflecting their sky-high whiteness on the sapphire waters where we were and sending us now and then a big wave with their winds---it was just a bunch of magnificence all right in one spot.