And I kept taking photos of dirt

The pond at Southern Monastery -- well, actually, I think it was a wide part of a flowing stream -- reminded me of the ponds and lakes in Snowstorm Region. Except the colours were different.

Perhaps it's because I've just had months and months of a white and grey landscape, but I just could not stop marveling (silently, of course) at how pretty the dirt was. A warm red. The colour of a brick hearth or a rusty barrel or a bed of pine needles in the sun. Such richness. I kept thinking of scenes from the book Gone With the Wind, a novel I read at a most impressionable age, and I kept hearing the Irish brogue of Gerald O'Hara in my head. "It will come to you, this love of the land. There's no gettin' away from it if you're Irish."

Some of the monastery land did, indeed, used to be cotton fields, just like the fields in the book. When the weather grew warm, and I hiked through a field of grasses, I could just imagine the cotton plants moving above that rich red soil.