Younger than the mountains

Today I walked to the highschool and back. As I set out it was drizzling with puffy white clouds against a blue sky, and when I got to the path by the beach I could see mist hovering against the mountains illuminated by a sun that was hidden behind the patchy mysterious-gray clouds from which, presumably, the rain fell. The combination of light and blue and rain and shadow and mist was really breathtaking. I brought an umbrella because I enjoy carrying umbrellas but I realized that I don't have one with a curved handle, which is of course a necessity. I shall have to buy one. After a while it stopped drizzling and I gave up on the umbrella, and when the rain started again on my way back I just walked in the rain. It's a beautiful walk, and I discovered a route on which I almost never have to walk by the side of busy roads with no sidewalks. With that route I'm by the water within two minutes, and from there walking paths and streets with hardly any cars take me to the beach in front of the high school.

It's not much of a beach. I'm now convinced the school in AIR really is based on Kasumi High School, but they changed a few things: in the anime, there are stairs leading up to the top of the cement wall that separates the street from the beach, for one thing. Really, if you want to get up on top, you have to walk along the top of the wall from the very beginning, where the ground is level with the top. Also, in the anime they cleaned up the beach and the view out to the water so that it's a pure stretch of sand and ocean. In fact, that section of beach is full of grass and stones, and in the water are a few rows of those odd jack-shaped cement things. However, the view is still gorgeous. As a beach, though, the part on my side of the bridge is more user- and swimmer-friendly.

On my way back I found a small, clear marble on the ground. I decided it would be included in my shrine in the tatami room when I make one. (I use the term shrine loosely here.)

This song is oddly famous in Japan -- apparently, it's in the English textbooks they use, which may partly account for why. (But why is it in the textbooks?) I seem to have been asked to sing it with the TIA acapella group at some event on September 23rd. Heh. Random. But these lines, I think, aren't so irrelevant as all that to this area...

Life is old here,
Older than the trees,
Younger than the moutains,
Growing like a breeze.