KHEE KIAT (Lazy)

KHEE KIAT ("Lazy")

It's still feeling complicated trying to know how to keep this blog going.  Writing life, working life, and life are all much the same right now.  It's late October and I am back in Kravan after a three-week trip to Canada.  This trip was much better than the trip in April (see below); perhaps I knew enough not to walk down the street where I used to live. 

I spent most of my time on two farms two-and-a-half hours north of the city.  The days couldn't have been more beautiful.  The leaves were changing color – the maples, ash, birch and beech, butternut and tamarac.  After a warm rainy summer, the grass was a beautiful deep green, a green that I never see here in Kravan, a green like missal-toe at Christmas.  An English green.

Fall, for me, has always been such an "emotional" time in rural Ontario, as it was in Wyoming where I grew up.  Life is about to change, dramatically, no matter what.  Winter is long in Ontario, and even longer in Wyoming.  And summer is a jewel.

When I was a kid I always wondered why I'd been born in Laramie, Wyoming.  Why not southern California, where people wear shorts and short-sleeve shirts all year long?  The answer I knew was an easy one:  because I hadn't.  I was born in Laramie, and I moved to Ontario when I was 31 years old, and now, for the time being, I live here, in southern northeastern Thailand.  

Does Thailand have an autumn?  Yes, of sorts, and it's now. 

Today in Kravan is the first day of harvest, of cutting rice by hand (tractors have been busy for almost a week now).   It's October 27.  I should be cutting rice but I am writing a blog instead.