I'm sitting here with a cat on my lap seeing a video my friend Carole gave me of Japanese gardens, a PBS documentary. It's an hour-long moving slide show of gardens I take to be idealized landscapes that offer tranquility to somebody walking through one.

I turn the volume down and play some music with it. Tonight I'm hearing Lullaby for the Moon, traditional Japanese music played on the bamboo flute and the koto, an instrument with thirteen silk strings.

It's amazing to hear the sounds the masters of these two instruments can make. It's like hearing a version of the mountain autoharp, plucked instead of strummed, and a flute. After hearing it several times the foreign oriental sound becomes familiar and I hear in it influences on 20th Century composers. A couple of the song titles are Eight Miles Through a Mountain Pass and Moonlight on a Ruined Castle. The titles bring to mind old-time mountain song titles like Shoot That Turkey Buzzard and Fire on the Mountain.

The visual part on the TV makes a window I can look through at a beautiful landscape that is always changing, like a screensaver that runs for an hour before it repeats. The simplicity of the music has in it the flow of water in a mountain stream. This is the best I can do indoors when it's too cold out there (in the 40s) to enjoy being still for very long at a time. The music being completely unfamiliar makes it more like the movement of water than something that hooks into my mind with words I understand. That's what I like about foreign language music. The voice becomes an instrument that flows with the other instruments in the band. When meaning is left out I hear the music more clearly. Music with the tranquility of a walk through God's nature makes an excellent form of white noise.

At this moment, Aster is outside barking at something that got her attention, possibly a deer out in the field. She has her lines marked for the deer to know how close they are allowed to the house. Cross that line and dog turns into wolf. Pretty scary in the dark when the deer come out to graze in the meadow. She sounds the foghorn to let them know it's dangerous ground if they get too close.

They stand not very far away and look at her. The deer know that as long as they stay the other side of the agreed upon line she's just barking to hear her head roar. They know Aster and she knows them. This has gone on for years through several generations of deer.

Mama deer says to baby deer, "Over there lives a big black dog that would love to eat a baby deer. She'd chew you up and lick her lips when she was done and say she had herself a fine meal. You stay away from that dog, baby. You hear mama? I mean it."

They grow up knowing Aster's voice, that this is the ground she guards for her human that lives in the box. "When one of them human beins sees you, baby, you dead, that's it! They say pow and you dead. Don't never let one of them see you, baby, not if you can help it. They got your daddy and your grandpa and grandma and aunt Ina and your brother Joey, too, and he weren't nothin but a spike. You all I got, baby. Stay close to mama."

The deer grow up and big dog turns into not-so-big dog, and when the deer learn they can outrun any dog, then it's nothing but a bark. This is where the barking dog lives. Across the hill is where another barking dog lives. The deer know where all the barking dog stations are in this part of the mountains, like foghorns at sea.

A propeller plane just now flew over, sounding at first like it was part of the music. I wondered what kind of instrument made that sound. It came into the music like some electronic instrument, like a keyboard Pink Floyd sound fading in. I knew it couldn't be, but it took awhile to separate it from the music enough to make out what it was. If that's ever happened to me before, I didn't notice. But there's a lot I don't notice, so that's not saying much. I don't expect to hear it again any time soon.

The cats are each in their separate sleeping places, curled up and feeling secure at home where the human and the dog protect them from creatures that hunt cats in the dark. Aster is zonked out on her cushion. She gives evidence that plenty of sleep is a good thing.

It's getting on up there to that time of night. I'm starting to nod off and think about joining my housemates in slumber. I've let the video end and eject, and will let this playing of the music be the last.

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