~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Talked to an elderly farmer gentleman, one of the old family names around here, he stopped in his truck when he saw me standing outside with a shovel, sweating with no shirt on beneath my cowboy hat, looked me over for a few seconds, got out and ambled over, started to talk the way breezes start to blow; a most natural and unhurried individual, genetically conditioned by centuries of winds and waves and germination on a mountainside above a lake on an island that one day came by some quite subordinate process to be called Japan. He said that the rain had been good so far, had been bad last year and he didn't know if it would be good next year, no depth of consideration required where such would be folly, a wisdom lost in the citified world, most certifiably in the stock market. We chatted of everything from farming to the Heian era to poetry and snowfall as he lit a cigarette and smoked it to ash and then went on his way the way a breeze goes on its way.