rock on

Oh, to be a cat. And yawn a lot and stare nonchalantly at the world with not a care--unless you're hungry, of course, and then you think nothing of having to move the earth and the stars in order to get someone to feed you.

Oh, to be a cat. Cats don't have chores. I have chores. I have lots and lots of chores. I make lists of chores, and strike them out one by one while adding others two by two, resulting in a long line of things to do stretching into something very near infinity. I've never found chores so reassuring, but somehow now my chores have "meaning"--meaning I guess that I'm stuck with the results of my chores in a way that was never true with rental property.

And one of my ongoing chores is sinking the rest of the Sajima stones that were once part of the old house's foundation into the earth to make uneven stepping stones through the garden. I have finished embedding five of them, but I chose the smaller ones to start, which was a good thing, since I've found that it's a much more tiresome task than I first imagined.

The contractor finished the garden with a layer of new soil, between a couple centimeters up to about 15 centimeters, over the top of the clay and gravel that made up the former driveway. The old landlady had been conned a while back by a company that just dumped a load of gravel and charged her a fortune, and that's what we have to deal with--unless we want to dig up the entire place and replace it with better earth.

Anyway, I discovered that clay and gravel were not a welcoming medium for a shovel, so I've switched to a pick, and chop away, sparks flying, to make a bed for the stones. I'm guessing that they weigh around 100 pounds, so once I drop them in, it's backbreaking work to haul them out again (if the pit isn't deep enough, for example, which has been the case for every stone so far). This has kept me from doing more than two per weekend, since I find myself quickly looking for other, less taxing chores, like chopping wood, or pulling a stubborn cork from a cheap bottle of wine.

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.

unbottled cat

You've finished your chores--washing the salt off the windows, washing the car, finally hauling the boxes out of the closets, stacking old photo albums, trying to ignore how young you were in those old photo albums--and there's nothing left to do but lay your chin down on the dining room table to stare at the cat and the sunset.

happy new one

IN THE MIDST OF UNPACKING and unwinding from the last year, we were far enough along to settle in with new year activities and begin some traditions that will color our new life. Some neighbors, who have two little daughters, invited us to pound some rice with them and their friends. This was m's second mochi tsuki taikai of the year--since there was one at her new day care center--and we met a lot of local people. They didn't seem to have a lot in common other than that they were all very laid back, and seemed rather proud of goofing off as much as possible: going fishing, kayaking, surfing, laying around. No one seemed to be suffering from the lack of a work ethic, but I'm sure it's not as easy as it looks. We ate a lot of the mochi, and got some for the kagami mochi offering to put in our tokonoma. A bit rough, but it stacked fine, and was a perfect size for a tiny citrus topping.

M spent a lot of the last few days preparing the New Years food, which she's never done before. A lot of time on the phone with her mom, and getting faxed recipes. We were going to go to the local shrine after midnight, but m was starting to pass out, the winds were still blowing like banshees, and it had gotten very cold. From previous years, we know the lines are going to be very long: fun when you're in the foot stomping, fist pounding mood, but . . . we weren't.

I've never been a great fan of a lot of o-sechi ryori because I find it too sweet, but M always goes easy on the sweeteners so the food on the morning of New Years Day was perfect. She swears she's going to up the menu each year, and I'm looking forward to it--a treat considering how people rely more on convenience stores and groceries for their osechi these days.

Then we made it to the shrine to pay our respects. The Akiya shrine sits high up on the side of the hills overlooking the sea. It's old and weathered, and it was almost empty when we stopped by: only one or two other families, and we chatted for a while and played with an old, one-eyed pug named Cherry. I didn't ask what M and m's wishes were, but I presume they were pretty close to mine--that the gods look kindly on our joining their neighborhood.