And I'll be there to shine in your Japan

I'm sick of my own noise about grief. This is not to say that I'm going to stop writing about it, but it would be nice to have other parts of my life, and to talk about them here.  So my goal is to post something here every day, and get a better grip on where grief actually lives in my life.

So to that end - I went out after work yesterday to visit the Portland Japanese Garden.  The day was a little too warm and a little too bright, but the garden was lovely and not too terribly filled with tourists.

I was actually looking for a specific Japanese maple, one that I'd had a framed photo of on my walls in Baltimore, without ever realizing it was from Portland. I'm not sure I found that particular tree, but there were some lovely specimens.  Follow the link at the bottom to see my shots of them.

Mt. Hood was in full splendor:

Of course, there were koi - and they always make me think of the character Grandfather Trout in Little, Big, a character both Jay & I loved:

And there was zen:

A few more shots at the Flickr set.  I didn't take many pictures because the lighting really was all wrong.