(no subject)

there's a man I see on my way home from school sometimes, a small and thin bent-backed, white-haired man who has a container garden.  A little gray fence screens a square meter of green, with a long-needled pine tree and another leafy vine reaching into the alleyway.  But outside of the perimeter of the fence is where the containers lie.  Three days ago I swore he was pulling carrots from one small pot, and yesterday he was trimming dead leaves off of his geraniums.  Each pot is hardly bigger than the plants I used to have on our porch in LA, although he probably has fifteen pots, some bunched together in one small space like little terraces, four others strung out along the outside of the fence with late-summer plants growing valiantly in the summer humidity.  It's a marker for me, when coming back home, that I'm more than halfway back to my little room - a place to set my burdens down and cool off from the sweating, sweltering, cloying heat of the day (no matter how cold the air conditioners on the trains run they barely cut through the air).

( but my recent days have been less filled with quiet things )

And now, since I haven't taken pictures, but I succumbed to the temptation of snapping away while at Meiji Shrine, the three pictures that I actually liked from the bunch.

( they're not too bad, for touristy pictures )

Ikebana (flower arranging) tomorrow. Possibly movie Thursday night, and a friend from Texas is coming to stay with me on the weekend!