-
Long walk between rains
Kali came to visit this long weekend and though it rained on Friday and poured on Sunday, Saturday was a lovely day. We decided to head up to Futatsuyama from home. It’s about an hour’s walk one way if you aren’t rushing, and we weren’t. Most of the journey is a paved country road, narrow…
-
Flea Season
Forget spring, what we really have is flea and tick season. After yesterday’s tick bite on my leg, I went on alert and sure enough, I caught a little tiny tickling wandering on Maura’s fur in the evening. I combed him carefully and found two fleas as well. Great… Flea combing the cats is a…
-
Two Mice & a Tick
Here in Japan, spring has several heralds: Here at 555, I have additional metrics based in nature. MOUSE #1I was doing a crossword puzzle after dinner when I heard the cadence of a cat with a mission. There’s a certain pattern to Maura’s movement when he has caught a snack. Fast and steady steps, low…
-
Sisyphean raking
A storm is coming in and there’s too much wind to safely burn the margins of the rice terraces, so today at Oyama Senmaida we raked grass into piles to be torched later. But there was a lot of wind, so the piles blew down the embankments. I felt like Sisyphus rolling his rock up…
-
Ideas in Dreams
A while back, I had a dream that I was attending an event held by an author. I woke up with the recognition that everything in the dream was my actual creation. I mean, it seems obvious, right? But this dream pushed a lot of my buttons. The main character was a pastiche of successful…
-
Cassoulet
I made my first cassoulet yesterday. I didn’t get a photo when we sat down to eat it, but I snapped one while making it. Tokyo friends with good food sense came to visit and I had a freezer full of random meat, so I emptied the freezer in pursuit of a special dish for…
-
21 Huron Circle
I learned this week that my childhood home burned down in April 2022. It was a sad moment to take in and I am still feeling moody. Even though my parents moved away in 1989 while I was in college – over 35 years ago – 21 Huron Circle was an anchor of memories and…
-
Ants Climbing a Tree
I made this Chinese noodle dish for a party and want to save my version of the recipe so I can make it again. The key to the whole thing is finely chopping all of the ingredients so that the “ants” can climb the tree of the noodles. The flavor is spicy from the mustard…
-
Knowing Foreigners
I read an interesting article last week in the Japan Times reporting on a survey of Japanese people in rural areas regarding their (lack of) interactions with foreigners. I am pasting the whole thing here to be able to reference is again in a decade: A recent survey has shown Japanese people who reside outside…
-
Burning the banks
One of the many tasks done in Japanese rice fields is burning the edges of the paddies to reduce weed seeds and insects which in turn prevents larger pests from moving in and eating the rice when its planted. Some farms do their noyaki in the autumn after harvest and others do it in the…
Archives