~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


The darkening jade rice stalks are beginning to nod with the weight of goldening grains, the farmers are putting up their fences to keep the wild pigs away, and in the midst of this green and golden surfeit with the mountains majestic in their craggy heights and trailing mists, the Lake stretched out in the blue of the morning sky, it simply amazes me once more and fills me with thanks that everyone in Japan doesn't live here.
It's interesting to grow seeds from America here on the other side of the world. You can almost sense a kind of uncertainty in the seedlings when they emerge and look around, visaless, at these much longer rains and alien soil and odd cultural references (shrine bells at 6AM??), suffering a sort of vegeculture shock. With an orphany look about them they rise up tentatively out of the odd ground, unsure of the climate, the oriental magnetic resonances, the alien gamma ray intensities, who knows what; but there is something: they are not fully at home here at the moment of germination, or likely in their entire lives. In contrast to the natively bred seeds, which bounce up and reach right for the sky, largessing fruits as they go, the vegies in a strange land stay low; they sense in their essence and vegetal memory that something strange is going on, so the zukes don't fertilize, the cukes dive for the ground, the beans won't touch the sky with a ten-foot pole, the peppers give up in the long rain, as do some of the tomatoes (the beefsteaks, being such thoroughbreds, are also quite unsettled by the monkeys) and especially the onions, which are almost pathologically patriotic. Some things don't germinate at all, or not very well, or the resulting plants are small and half-hearted, homesick perhaps, even though I speak English to them and they hear The Pixies, Trane and Zappa on the stereo. I will try and save some seeds, if I get some reasonably semblant fruits, and attempt to grow them again with their new and more acclimated genomic memories. My own kids, for example, are growing much more at home here than I'll ever be, though I do try my best to touch the sky.