I was out in the garden yesterday afternoon working, mainly lopping back elm branches that were shading out a young oak, and cutting back the ever-invading brambles. This was in the old part of the big garden. After a while I got tired and just sat on the grass and looked around. After a week of clouds and fog and never a glimpse of the sun, a couple of days ago the weather finally cleared, and we were blessed with blue skies and a sparkling orb and mild soft air. The winter grass is flourishing, green and soft--it needs cutting--and the trees are in their subdued autumn garb. The old garden was the first part we planted, and we made a lot of mistakes, which we haven't yet gotten around to correcting. Wrong plants, puny growth, weeds, and so on. But as I looked, I thought, "The garden is beautiful". The sun was low, and the near-horizontal rays lit the lower stratum of air out toward the Po Valley, lilac with a touch of dirty brown from smog, while I could see across our own valley toward the hills to the south of us. The light was golden, the grass bright green; the Italian cypresses looked dense and noble, their outlines sharply cut. The garden's trees and shrubs have, some of them, reached dimensions that can be felt: this is no longer the field of meager grass we started with back in 2005; this is a garden. It was deeply satisfying to feel this for once, as usually I'm focused on the thousands of tasks to be done or the endless imperfections of our work. But not yesterday evening.