just a thought.

Mimi died when we came back from Venice just before the arrival of our grand daughters.
He was a happy and self sufficient cat, a persian with golden eyes. He was sixteen.
We took him to the vet and had him put to sleep, it was a hard and painful decision to take, but he was obviously suffering and could hardly breathe.
This end of August, the plane tree in our yard, which has been giving freshness when the air is burning for at least seventy years or more, is dying. It is sad to see it is no longer green; the leaves fall with a cracking sound which goes with their look: dried up and brownish with white burned edges. It is a fungus which is attacking them all around here, they say. Pollution is also reponsible for this weakness, so they also say, as this summer all the plane trees seem to be suffering from the same disease.
All my plants in pots, my orchids, cannot survive without some helpful hand watering them.
I know the fragile side of all that and yet being confronted with these facts upset me a lot. Withering plants make me feel uneasy, almost like someone I cannot help, no matter what I try to do.
A sense of loss which is now related to the dear ones I have lost. This feeling is stronger than ever this summer.
Maybe it is linked to the strange atmosphere of the time being.
When D. went to China, there was a fearful flu panicking the planet. The chickens and other birds were responsible for it.
Now the threat comes from swine, almost the same panic with this new type of flu all round the world. It is difficult to decide how much is manipulation for some commercial interests and how much a very serious disease.
And always the menace of nuclear weapons. Never to be forgotten. In fact the worst disease of all. The falling leaves in mid-summer are just a reminder to me of this obvious fact of life.
A wonder to be alive. Indeed.
When Monteverdi survived the 1634 Plague year in Venice he went on a pilgrimage to thank God for having spared his life.
That is not in my scope and belief, but I can understand the act, which involved his heart, conscience and physical strength.
I wish it could be that easy now, undertake a long walk, thinking, Compostelle?
The Great Wall? just going up the Luberon?
Impossible in summer, because of the fire threat. The roads are closed until the end of summer. A wise protection for the pinewood forets.
So I have to face the decision about the decaying plane tree of the yard. I dread to think of the noise of the saw and the bangs of the boughs falling with more leaves cracking which will have to be removed. Sounds of extraction. End of it.
Is there a sensible cure for it?
Nature as it still is, not far from here, in the Queyras and this delicate pale rose plant growing almost on bare stone called 'sempervivum '...