Mockingbird Hill Cottage

This morning, as I raised the blind in the kitchen, I saw a beautiful buck just a few feet from the window. I rarely, if ever, see bucks on our property and have never seen one this close! Unfortunately, I didn’t have my phone with me, so the perfect shot eluded me. However, he stayed in the yard for a long time, eating the brush, safely camouflaged from human predators. We must have stood there for 10 minutes watching him. Don took a video, which is on his IG account (@donsroadtrip).

Look closely. You can see him.

We think he’s an older buck. He was walking slowly and bit stiffly – sort of like us – but goodness, was he beautiful!

I said to him “Stay here on this side of the road. You’re safe here.” He is, as all of the surrounding property is privately owned by our neighbors.

A beautiful way to start our morning. Almost like a private viewing, just for us. He didn’t seem at all concerned that we were standing on the other side of the window. I’m not even sure he noticed us. Normally, when we see deer right outside the kitchen, they notice us, freeze for a moment, and move on. Not this guy. And we’re grateful for that.

It’s gray, windy and cold out there today. Not my favorite weather.

This is what it looked like around here in the late afternoon yesterday. I had walked down the driveway to get the mail (including the newest Louise Penny) and turned back toward the house. I didn’t try to lighten this photo because I wanted you to see it as taken. As I said on IG, I love our house, but I find this particular barren view depressing.

Sigh.

I think I’ll put up the porch Christmas lights today simply to have some cheery lights out there. We need that.

We watched Florence Foster Jenkins  last night. What a wonderful movie, with the incomparable Meryl Streep, who I am convinced can do anything, Hugh Grant, and Simon Helberg. As I was watching, knowing nothing about the actual filming whatsoever, I became convinced that it was filmed, at least in part, in England. I believed that more than a few of the actors who were playing American characters were British. There’s a ‘tell’ in the way they do an American accent – a sort of flatness, a bit of nasality, a change in inflection – that I can spot a mile away. (It is, after all, what I do for living.) There are some British actors who do American dialects flawlessly. But, I have to say, most of them don’t. It sort of drives me crazy.

Sure enough, much of it was filmed in England. And the actors I was suspicious of? British.

My theory – and it’s just a theory – is that to Brits, the American accent sounds flatter, more nasal, less melodious. After all, one of the things I love about British dialects as a rule is their use of much more melody and range than we tend to use. So the actors, and their coaches, tend to concentrate on the nasality they think they’re hearing and the comparatively flatter, less rounded vowel sounds that we use, and the sound becomes a wash of those qualities, which are part of, but by no means all of the qualities in the way we speak. We have our own melodies that we use when speaking. They’re just different than a British dialect.

I suppose Brits would say the same thing about Americans using British accents, though I do think, generally, we’re a bit better at it. When I was acting, I was often pulled aside by audience members who were British and were convinced that I was also British. Obviously, I wasn’t.

This is daily life around here when you have two actors living in a cottage, one of them a vocal coach. We constantly comment about actors emphasizing the wrong word in a line, or stressing pronouns when it’s not at all appropriate, or not articulating clearly, or, in this case, not quite sounding American. We can’t help it. On the other hand, we far more often praise actors’ work, knowing everything that goes into making a role come alive, and just how tough that is. Acting is hard work and exemplary acting? Amazing. Rare. Meryl Streep? One of the rarest.

I’ve also started The Comforts of Home, Susan Hill’s newest Simon Serailler mystery. It’s excellent.

I had a couple of comments from readers concerning On Tyranny, which I recommended yesterday. It’s on sale on Amazon for $6.39 in paperback and the Kindle version is $3.99. Go for it!

Happy Wednesday.