GATHERINGS

Spent yesterday gathering a bucketful of chestnuts with Kaya, who stood and watched as I winkled the sleek brown throughbred beauties out of their porcupine husks with my boot toes, then she picked them up with the tongs and dropped them into the bucket with a very special quantity of satisfaction. When we were done she lugged the bucketful up to the house and gave it to Echo, filling the whole house with the pride of a task well accomplished. We then went to the park and tackled the long slide, after which Kaya napped while I sectioned the long whiskey barrel staves with the chainsaw, smelling fine whiskey all the while on the big snifter that is the air. At last when my right arm gave out (cutting stacked barrel staves with a chainsaw is basically a one-handed chainsaw operation) and I was wrapping it up, the wind was picking up to a good mountain howl when I spotted the mother lode of mukago revealed in the slant of evening sunlight. The lode was laced through the pulled-over tops of the bamboo just the other side of the cherry/pine firewood stack, upon which I climbed and stood teeter-hunched in the sunlit wind exploring the vast and deep fragrant tangle of green heart-leaved vines for the silvery air potatoes hidden here and there in the shadows like silver nuggets in the ground. When you harvest wild things that you suddenly find in abundance they just take you over, it's so much fun your self won't tell you when to stop; thank goodness pockets fill up and it gets dark, or I'd be out there yet.


Today we leave early for an overnight trip to Shigaraki and the Miho Museum.