WILD BREAKFAST

This morning on our usual mountainside walk we came across a yellow-leafed niche of mukago, which surprised us because this seems to be a bad year for them - I guess we found the mother lode. We picked a good handful to have with lunch.

A kilometer or so later we came across a couple of very heavily bearing wild kaki (persimmon) trees of the kind whose fruit, being small and very sweet, is usually dried for winter eating; so since these were wild and there was clearly too much for the birds and the monkeys before it all spoiled, and being myself of ancient simian lineage I just stood beneath that golden cascade of heavy-bent branches and plucked and began eating the ones at the summit of ripeness, golden orbs that were almost translucent, like the kaki in that famous old painting Six Persimmons by Mu Ch’i (above), as though a light were shining from within them…

Eating those persimmons beneath their tree, surrounded by its pendant branches, was like eating the way you eat in a dream, the way you do anything wonderful in a dream, your being filled to the breath with every reach of the experience, in this case the taste and texture and sweetness and lifeglow of a wild persimmon just plucked from its tree, its orange parchment skin peeled away to reveal amber flesh like solidified honey, and as I was ecstasizing over the savor of each bite, Echo found some ripe akebi just hanging there on their vine in the forest shadows, voluptuously open, revealing their pale white fruit ready to eat and so we dined al fresco the rest of the way on handfuls of fruit, our mouths reveling, when we found the last of the blueberries, swollen to their essence... what a magical breakfast, and all on nature's tab...