"This lovely world"

[Why is the line spacing off on this post? Do you know?]

"This lovely world" is made up. Like everything else.
I was talking to a pal about my next print project--what shall it be?
They suggested I write a story with bears in it.

I said, "I'm not good making up stories, I can only show things that happened. 'The Moth Burial' is a documentary."

Nonfiction is a story too, though, and people see into it.
Also, of course I'm aware that dolls burying a moth was an event "made up" by me. But then, everything, this whole lovely world is made up--that's what our brains do, right?

[The comedian poet Alok responds to complaints that the trans community is "making up words" (for pronouns, etc.): All words are made up.]

A couple pals on FB left comments on "The Moth Burial" that I want to save, I like so much what they saw in the story.
Jeff, once blogger of the Oort Cloud (2008-2011), had, like me, lost a family member to suicide years ago. He used to quote from Charlotte's Web, "this lovely world, these precious days…”*
When he commented on "The Moth Burial" I quoted the first half, and he batted it back:

And, from another longtime, intermittent friend:

Charlotte's Web ends at the fairgrounds.
Our state fair starts in three weeks, and I can already feel the summer beginning to tip away. Walking around the lake yesterday, I was almost beaned by a falling acorn.

It's hot this weekend but is supposed to drop back to the 70s next week. I've been walking around the lake every day. It's 8 a.m.--I  must leave soon if I'm going to get a walk in today before the heat gets too thick.  But I'm a bit squeezed for time because I'm also meeting my friend RMG at 10--she is moving to Maine in a couple weeks. (Where Charlotte and Wilbur lived!) Maybe I'll just slack off today and keep chatting here...
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Can you see the word on the menu the pink arrow is pointing to?

It's CHEESE! Cheese in Coconut Curry. Coconut Curry Pasta. This is suburban Minnesota.
I went with L & M to the Chanhassen Dinner Theater to see "Beautiful: The Carole King Musical. The play--a "jukebox musical" (mostly songs)--was actually pretty great! but the meal was just a notch above airplane food. (bink disagrees--her steak was very good, she says.)

We went because bink's 23-year old niece Anya is in the play. Anya has always wanted to act--when she was nine, she was terrific as Iphigenia in my little movie Orestes and the Fly--and she has actively pursued that work ever since.
Anya is spangle-ific in Beautiful as one of the Shirelles.
I wish I could find a photo of her wearing orange go-go boots and beehive hairdo. But here she is in silver --back row, center:

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* "This lovely world..." is from a passage in Charlotte's Web, by E. B. White. The spider Charlotte is dying, and her friend, the pig Wilbur, whom she has saved from being slaughtered for food, asks her how she is.
She says...

“A little tired, perhaps. But I feel peaceful . . . Your future is assured. You will live, secure and safe, Wilbur. Nothing can harm you now.
These autumn days will shorten and grow cold. The leaves will shake loose from the trees and fall. Christmas will come, then the snows of winter. You will live to enjoy the beauty of the frozen world . . .
Winter will pass, the days will lengthen, the ice will melt in the pasture pond. The song sparrow will return and sing, the frogs will awake, the warm wind will blow again. All these sights and sounds and smells will be yours to enjoy, Wilbur — this lovely world, these precious days . . . "