EVERY REAL MOMENT

On Sunday took the goodies swimming again, this time across the lake at a secret beach right beyond the famously photographed nanohana garden (in this season full of sunflowers) on the lakeside roadway whence, I suspect, Hiroshige got some of his mountain views for Omi-Hakkei, a view that Basho in his local wanderings no doubt also stopped to admire.

Comfortably heedless of all this history, and of the splendid view, the trio spent their time in the water, with only rare breaks for food or drink, the slanting beams of the westering sun lighting the lake surface to a sparkling blue lain out before the green mountains, the vast paddy slope beside which we live clearly visible as a patch of imperial jade on the tree-dark green of the distant slopes, whose shape Hiroshige captured in his own way; it was less than 200 years ago, that distant human world, a split second to a mountain.

And there in the sun of much the same afternoon were the offspring of that world, three little sisters in their bright bathing suits in the light of the same setting sun, holding hands to make a ring in the gleaming water and singing songs to fill a New Yorker’s hungry heart. With even the slightest real look (real looks is all they have, at that age), they make me realize with a bit of mental lightning what I have known since birth but that often slips my attention: every real moment is beyond price.