Stella Maris

The view last Sunday from the study window. 

I don't remember ever seeing this before: a planet (I should probably look up which one) ready to drop into the moon's crescent like the action of a pinball game--or pachinko. If it were to bounce out, there's the very faint cone of Mt. Fuji waiting below to catch it. (If you can't see it this size, click on the photo for a larger version.)

M has opened her therapy salon, and found a name for it: Stella Maris--or Star of the Sea. She's got an account of our making the sign on her blog, and has her home page up--thanks to a lot of friends helping out with the design, etc.

I say tomato

That was quick. It was just a week or so ago that we planted the tomato seedlings, and this morning m and I noticed that we already had a couple of new friends. The garden is small: tomatoes (several kinds), zucchini, green, yellow and red peppers, shishito, shiso, cucumbers, goya (the bitter Okinawan gourd), garlic, and some eggplant. Almost everything has already started to flower, since the weather has been so sunny recently. In Tokyo, vegetable prices are high thanks to the cold spring, but the open markets down here are far cheaper. We got a whole bunch of radishes for ¥100 the other day from a roadside stall and they were so sweet that we went back for more but they were sold out. Cabbage is a spring specialty of this area, along with the Miura daikon, and they're so cheap and huge and sweet that M has found all kinds of ways to cook--woooooooooooh a kite (the hawk, not the toy) with a wingspan of about a meter just caught a perfect wind right outside my window and was hovering motionless for about 10 seconds--them (the cabbages, not the kite).

The first eggplant flower.

Scar Tissue

Here's the start of my two-hour (one-way) commute: my Honda Super Cub that got me back and forth between my job and my Tokyo home for five years. What would have taken me 45 minutes door-to-door was cut to 15 minutes and change, though I had to hide it from the company. We did about 20,000 kilometers over those years. Now I'm doing the same 15 minutes a day on the bike, but unfortunately it gets me only to Zushi Station, which is where the trip really starts.

The first day was ominous, if I were someone who saw omens in daily happenings. It was raining, so I decided to park in the pay parking garage. Motorcycle parking is on the third floor, up some ramps and stairs, and I was tired and not paying attention since it was late in the evening, and I found my back tire sliding off the ramp onto the stairs and my leg caught between the muffler and the cement stairs. The result was a painful scrape that has left a pretty nice scar, and that--and the fact that it's not cheap--convinced me to use the free lot.

It's a free-for-all, first come, first served, slice of mayhem. When the lot gets full, people just pull up to the entrance and heave their bikes onto the tops of others, so you have to be willing to spend some time digging your bike out of a jumble of spokes and mirrors and kickstands. Now that the weather is really starting to warm up, I'm wondering if it will get even worse.

Twattler

What were once pristine expanses of sugi flooring now host innumerable scratches and gouges--the result of midnight carousing by the cats, who run up and down and around this house in scenes right out of Tom and Jerry, their legs spinning recklessly as they careen around corners until they once again get traction, sending chunks of wood from the soft sugi flying. It bothered me when we first moved in, at least until the inevitability of it all sank in. Now the house bears the scars as markers of the time we’ve spent here.

The six months since I last posted have seen a lot of other milestones. M’s massage therapy salon goes into operation tomorrow. m has been a first grader for a month already. I’ve almost done 13,000 kilometers of daily commute. A ton of wood was burned in the wood stove to keep us warm over the winter (and a cold April saw us burn more than January). Trees and a small garden have been planted. Wood sheds built. Parties held. Milk spilled. Shoji torn. Mother's Day candles extinguished.

It may be illegal to use a blog to write about the distant past, but what the hell. I’ll think of it as the anti-Twitter, the Twattler, so to speak, and try to catch up with what’s been going on. It all has gone by so fast, it will be nice to think about it again.