Off the Cliff

No leaves, barely even buds, and the April sun has moved into the right half of my study window to blind me with its glare. I put up the louvered shutters which are not quite tall enough to reach the window top, and place my newly recovered shoji in front of that. The shoji is covered in white paper only (the previous avatar was red, and a bit too dark) and I sit in cool white light, most elegant. This brief indoors calm will change when it gets warm enough that the windows must be open, which is a whole other tsuris, what with wind knocking shutters down and invariably ripping the shoji paper. But for now the furnace needs still to be on at night, and the filtered white sun in the morning presents me with teasing memory fragments, swift impressions of sakura in Japan that first year or two, a white world under the trees, the pale sky ('vaporous', that was the word Hearn used: sky watered into nothing but the suggestion of blue, and most of it saturated cloud anyway)-- and the faint acridity of cars and pollution, trapped in the moisture-laden air, always there in the unpleasant sun.
( Closer to home )