-
Flourish 2020
It’s theme word time. This year, I feel like December has snuck up on me. We’re halfway through and I am not prepared to end my year with any forward looking anything. I can barely register what’s on today’s To Do list. Despite that, this tradition needs to continue. So for the past week, I’ve…
-
Dinner with cats
We walked to Mika for dinner tonight. It’s the closest restaurant to our house, about a kilometer away, 11 minutes on foot. It is also 11 minutes on four feet, if you are the cats who came along with us. They trotted through the back roads all the way there. I kept expecting them to…
-
Kozuka’s finest
Today our neighborhood policeman received a potted plant as an annual recognition for work well done in patrolling our neighborhood. We happened to be in the village and I asked to capture the moment. Everyone lined up for a photo, some a little confused at what this foreign woman was doing. After I snapped this…
-
Mikan time
Oranges ripening along the road near home. Not quite ready to pick yet. We can wait, because the other day we received this: A 10 kg gift of fancy mikan from Kagawa, in the citrus growing regions southwest of here. These are perfectly in season, delicious and juicy.
-
Cat stairs
They may look like shelves in the laundry area, but these are cat stairs from the roof. Tod rewired the outside light to fix the dangling mess of electrical cables the cats had torn from the wall as they would half-slide, half leap from the roof. Then we put up shelves strategically to give the…
-
Frost tipped flower
Dandelion clock is frozen in the field. Seen on the way to yoga this morning.
-
Unexpectedly Thanksgiving
The weight of loss upon me, and plenty of work deadlines to meet, I was not planning to celebrate Thanksgiving with a feast. My morning yoga class had a theme of kansha, appreciation, and I arranged our yoga mats in a circle like a table. Good enough. At breakfast, Tod and I discussed dinner plans…
-
Grey days
Literally and figuratively, these have been grey days. On the literal side, we have had more clouds than sun for the past couple of weeks, including a 50 hour non-stop rain. Enough of that, please. On the figurative side, I should have believed people who said after Mom died, “The holidays are the hardest.” I…
-
Hoshigaki
I don’t like persimmon very much when it is fresh, but I love dried persimmon. Today I helped Naomi and Hitomi prepare persimmons for drying. We started by picking them from the Hatanakas’ tree. Then we sat on the kitchen floor at Monaca to trim and peel them. We tied them onto strings, dipped them…
-
Sawarabi bazaar
Sawarabi is the local souvenir wholesale company; they produce Kamogawa lemon snacks, pirate-themed, seashelled chotkes for SeaWorld, and all manner of stuffed toys. Once a year, they have a bazaar to sell off samples, old stock, and random doodads. Last year, we got pirate hats and a ton of stocking stuffers. But we arrived late…
Archives