LIKE A ROLLING STONE

One day recently, with Keech at my side here in Japan while FaceTiming with Kasumi and the Trio in CA, upon seeing my image in the corner of the iPad screen I remarked with some surprise: "As I get older, I'm looking more and more like Keith Richards..."

At that, two  sibling voices from opposite sides of the globe responded as one: "WHO?" 

            --- Commence extended freezeframe of deep intergenerational awareness ---

As had happened at several recent instances in my life, what had been cultural Everests were suddenly shown to be current divots. Our family's earlier Western-flavored musical component had been more of a dylan-zappa-doors-nirvana-pixies blend, so this reaction was not so big a surprise, but one does accumulate a certain mindfill of beloved cultural debris over the decades, in contrast to which a more youthful perspective -- however chronically misguided -- can come as a shock. Thus marches history and its icons backward across the stage and beyond the wings, out of sight but to those who remember...                  Exeunt big time...

As to book affairs, the Simple Vegetarian Recipes 1-9 series from The Big Elsewhere will begin their shared appearance on Facebook any day now (long-term PLM readers please FB friend me), as soon as Kaya has completed her art work and the computer stops fritzing around. 

 Also, I can now fully extend my right arm.

DEPARTURES

Lotsa stuff going on, small stuff under the circs-- like the monkeys got all my biwa (loquats), what's new; I just took too long to get to them myself. Been meaning to post about the daily this and that but there's too much and too many types of bigger goings on, primary among them the fact that Kasumi and Trio are moving out of their apartment three years after moving here from up north right after the Fukushima disaster that set all this in motion.

The Quartet is now staying with us for the week of finalizing before moving on to California to start new lives there, so it's the beginning to an end of sorts for us as well; we'll now have less need for this big house, garden, firewoods... Uberdecisions must be considered; it's like I'm 25 again, but a few decades hopefully wiser... Hmmm...

This caught me short, I must admit; I'd been unaware of leaning so hard on the past, less toward the delight in things that come from tomorrow like light to the eye... But for the grandies themselves, whom I have seen grow to this loveliness, now will go on without end, just as it once would for me...

Once I did what they are doing: departed for but a mere spell of time - when I had so much of it - without need for a long glance back, since I would be returning before much time had gone-- and then one day, a moment ago was a lifetime away, and I learned that a heart could grow so large, hold dear so many worlds, and not quite fall to pieces...

JOURNAL ENTRY, December 2007

Yesterday Kaya and I went out to trim the plum tree. I got the ladder, saws and pruning shears; Kaya, nearly 7, likes the wheelbarrow, so she was in charge of that. The plan was, as I trimmed the small branches from the plum tree, Kaya would take them, clip them down to manageable size and put them in the wheelbarrow; when it was full, she would wheel the twigs over to the garden and dump them beside the compost pile.

So there we were-- I up on the ladder among the bare plum branches and Kaya standing beside the wheelbarrow with everything -- ready to go, but it seemed to seem to Kaya that something wasn't quite right, some essential was missing -- she realized what it was, ran into the house and came back out a few seconds later carrying her toy mouse, which she placed just where it belonged in the wheelbarrow. Now everything was ready.

But all plans carry seeds of change. As Kaya was doing her part with the plum twigs, she suddenly had an even better idea than our original one: she began to use the just-right pieces to build a fine house in the wheelbarrow for her mouse to live in, using the larger twigs for the frame and the smaller ones for the roof, with some nice roundish green leaves as shingles against the rain and snow, and who was I to object, from such a way-up-in-a-plum-tree perspective? From my view as material supplier, though the process was slowed by this radical redirection, the new architecture was attractive and functional. When the structure was completed it was getting dark, the plum tree had been trimmed - a little bit, anyway - the mouse was snug in the aptly named Wheelbarrow Mousehouse and it was time for night.

We're always asking heaven for more time, aren't we-- and there it is in front of us all along, right where we wanted it.

While there Was Light

The Trio of Brio - Kaya (12), Mitsuki (10), Miasa (10) - came over for a visit on Sunday, and when in the afternoon I came downstairs from my editing work in the loft for a break to investigate the unusual silence I noted that while Miasa was doing the intimidating mound of dirty dishes generated by the youthful hunger crew, her sisters were nowhere around. I asked her about that, and she said - with no sign of solo-dishwashing rancor - that they were outside somewhere, playing.

In the continuing oddness, despite all the open doors and windows I couldn't hear a single kidsound from outside, a rare situation with the Trio around, so I went outside barefoot - just gonna be out there a minute - and found Kaya hunkered down on the suntoasted evening road with the big binoculars at her eyes, trying to focus on Mitsuki who 100 yards or so down the mountain was jumping up and down and side to side, I guess trying to make herself more interesting or harder to see.

While the two went on with their optical gravity visualization experiment (I didn't ask, knowing I wouldn't understand the response; anyway you don't bother focused experimenters) I just stood there and looked around-- the whole blue sky up there like a big robin egg shell lit up from the outside, the mountain arms around reaching out, shadowed and unshadowed, in the rays of the sun now behind the peaks; the darkening blue lake smooth as the sky, sparkling with boats; the big island beginning to glimmer with fisherman house lights and the same beyond, disappearing into the mainland; behind me the sheets of last clouds turning from pale gold to mango before the dark and the stars; about then the girls gave up on the binocs and grabbed the garden hose, began watering themselves and the locality...

I just stood there turning and turning, bare feet cooling in the flowing water, while there was light.

THINNER THAN A MINUTE - from the archives

Kaya has the same 24-hour day as everybody else, but at two years of age she hasn't yet got enough experience to waste it properly as a youth, flaunt it as an adolescent, market it as an adult or treasure it as an elder. Minute- by-minute, she's engaged in the lifelong process of learning to do all that, and like all of us, must begin at the beginning and take it as it comes.

So at the moment there are great differences between Kaya and me in the way we navigate the day. To her, the world is an effortlessly open book, a ready playground, an all-day carnival, an endless private banquet, every day a birthday. I have to make a bit of a metaphysical effort to stay in that world with her for the hours we are together, but she makes it easy for me.

The difference might seem to reside in the six decades that separate us, but I as with just about everything in the universe I've ever run into, I suspect there's more to it than that. Kaya paints green stripes on her legs and spends long minutes hopping back and forth across the living room with glee in her heart and eyes. She does it spontaneously, without a second thought, with complete naturalness and no embarrassment. I can't recall the last time I did anything of the sort. Maybe at a frat party. Even now that glee evades me. Being alone with Kaya for hours at a stretch gives me new perspectives like that on just about everything, even the calligraphic powers of wet rice on an oak floor.

Historically, when I was two years old I probably spent my time pretty much the same way Kaya does now: practicing faces, being completely in places, posing all the poses, making all the noises in my untried repertoire, observing the effects of my menu of screams on the large, slow servants that surrounded and sought to control me yet catered to my infant whims, came at my call-- though I discontinued all that kind of thing at some point after college. Or maybe later.

We aren't really aware of, let alone keeping track of, all the minds we phase through in the hills and valleys of our years. Then one day later in life-- if we are so fortunate, after all that, to have a later - and then have the luck to spend sunny afternoon hours with someone like Kaya, the fun part of our past comes flooding back to a wiser perspective, from a place that isn't so far away after all.

The distance between childhood and elderhood turns out to be thinner than a minute.

HOLDING NEW HANDS

Soon I will be another grandfather, when my daughter Kasumi brings her second baby into the world, a brother or sister for Kaya. In the same way that one is a new father for each of one's own children, one is a new grandfather for each new grandchild.  Another grandfather is a remarkable thing to be, as anyone knows who's ever been one; it's a special experience never twice the same, like being an elephant now and then, or a giant redwood, or a choo-choo train, mountain, horsey or pogo stick, as required, and on through the endless list you now have time for.

It's not being full-time responsibly busy on all fronts, the way parenting was; now is when you get your chance at being that more flexible ancient continuous one we all are, layered over with being whatever you can muster up right now from the mythology: sort of post-graduate parenting. Being another grandfather is a newer thing than I expected. (And what if it's a boy?)

Still, it's not as though you have to learn how to be another grandfather; if you've managed to remain genuine, and still contain the magical savor of your own childhood and parenthood (you find that out with your first grandchild), then every subsequent grandfathering should come as naturally as holding a new hand.  One is already familiar with grandfathering, and whatever you give in that capacity is returned in more than full measure.

One evening recently I was walking with 2-year-old Kaya in the light of sunset, when she pointed to the western sky and shouted: "Pink!" while jumping up and down. I hadn't looked at the sunset in that full-eyed, amazing-discovery way for 60 years and there it was again, fresh as the first time, because I was holding a new hand.

***

[Wrote this way back then (2003) but never posted it, because Kasumi had twins(!) girls(!) and it got lost in the ensument... Came across it putting the book (Monkeys & Onions) together... RB]

ICICLES, EDUCATION

Kaya came over to visit the other afternoon and ran toward the house with more than her usual supernova of excitement, not because she was about to run inside to play video games, because there aren't any in there, or to do puzzles or draw pictures or write letters which she loves and can do for hours; she was overjoyed at spotting some big icicles dangling from the high eave that she couldn't reach, and then on the rim of one of the rain barrels she found a gleaming, straight, clear and thick icicle that she could get hold of and break off and lift up and look at from all angles - icicles held up high are filled with blue sky, as she demonstrated to all - then she had to find a worthy place for the shining crown jewel of the vicinity, she couldn't just throw it away or take it into the house and admire it by the woodstove, but where could she put it that would do justice to its beauty?

She searched and found the perfect spot on the front of our car, where the long diamond would fit snugly yet stand upright, pointing to the sky like an icicle should, to a child's way of thinking, like a diamondy thing from a story, and lo and behold, there stood the soul of fantasy, right on the front of our formerly just plain car, now turning into diamond. Clear and real was the magical ice, and the light it carried, so valuable and desirable, but shortlived, so all the more lookable at. When at last we went inside we could still see it from a window: a diamond full of sky, shining there in the dusk.

Almost goes without saying that Kaya is bored with school...

QUAKE UPDATES Day 11 +++

Had the trio stay over Sunday-Monday, on Sunday took them for lunch to Hot Station, where we ate outside in a field of nanohana with (nanohana in our bento!) beneath the snowy mountains, then went to get some spring water - which the girls love to do - then back home to our very own mountains of private snow that have arisen from the multiple shovelings of the deck over the ages of this winter, so the ladyettes could make snow men and in Kaya's case (quite the little artist) a snow rabbit. In mid-task she asked if we had some red berries, we had none; I thought a minute and gave her a small dried red pepper from a bunch hanging on the wall and her face lit up; I went out later to see what she had made and it was a wee snow rabbit with its wee snowfriend. Fun till bed, when they made a nest for themselves in an upstairs room, settled in under the big blankets, yawned and were asleep.

I did the same. Woke to laughter of Echo and the girls downstairs at breakfast... how quickly the young recover... giggles are a major gift of nature, good for every ill... and what bright energy the girls are now, for these moment untroubled and happy, with fun to be had... Kasumi was better by Monday and came to join us for the day, which was when we took the photo.

+

Started to order some stuff from the US via the internet the other day and at checkout was told: "Shipments to Japan will be delayed indefinitely." Apparently, all cargo transport is being commandeered for aid etc. for an indeterminate time, which is fully ok with me, but it was something of a shock to discover that sources abroad are cut off 'indefinitely.' Saw no news about that in the media; or when private shipments will be restored...

+

"Now I just feel hatred towards TEPCO," he says. "It is very difficult for me to say this since I have worked for them for 18 years. But I just think they should come clean with all the information they have."

Company's Handling Of Nuclear Crisis Sparks Anger

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One positive aspect to these catastrophic events, and historically perhaps the most remarkable, judging from what I've experienced here and in these past few days, is that because of the media revolution the world has just had its first genuine experience of The Global Community, its first real full-spectrum sense of how we are all in this together.

Japan's harrowing disaster, in all its horrible reality, was borne at the speed of light directly to the eyes and hearts of different cultures all around the world, whose people could right now see and be with and among the victims of quake, tsunami, radiation accidents; they could share the plight of countless of their fellow humans as never before in history-- oceans different from seeing in the morning paper over coffee a photo of some buildings fallen yesterday somewhere else in the world with another Thousands Die headline, then heading off to work...

In this new instant, the world became Japan and Japan the world. For the first time in history, we all felt it: we are all in this together. This was not politics, this was not spin, this was life - our life - all of us, here on this small blue spaceship. I believe that this will go down in history as a major turning point in the hopeful advance of civilization... If we can maintain our native integrity, keep our minds clear and learn to learn what we are being taught...

QUAKE UPDATES Day 10

 A photo at last! 

Finally we got together for a photo at one of those purikura (Print Club) photo booths in the game center at the super where we did some shopping. Clearly experienced at this are Kasumi on the right, Kaya in the middle, the twins at the bottom (Mitsuki on the right, Miasa on the left) and Echo on the left; then there's that puzzled and suspicious fellow at the top trying to find out where the hell it is I'm supposed to look within 0.3 seconds.

MORE PHOTOS FROM PURE LAND MOUNTAIN

ALPHABET

Yesterday when the grandies came and I was to babysit for a few hours, Kaya (9) and one of the twins (Mitsuki, 6) set immediately to playing with the toys, while the other twin (Miasa, also 6) sat quietly at the kitchen table, hunched over a notebook, drawing-- or so I thought.

When I happened to walk by and glanced at what she was doing, at first it looked like English words... But that couldn't be of course, since she doesn't speak English - though she has expressed a desire to learn English... Besides, she's only 6, and 6-year-olds often say things... But they WERE English words, beautifully printed and she was printing them! Beautifully! Huh?

One of her sisters was jumping rope and the other was rolling around the room on the big red ball, which are essential activities in themselves, but have the addictive quality of being fun. In stark contrast, Miasa had, before coming to visit, made ruled lines in her blank notebook, asked someone to print an English word on the left of each line and was now intently copying each printed word carefully and in surprisingly expert fashion, over and over till she reached the end of the line, when she would start on the next line and word. She wasn't having fun or showing off, she was just doing it, and had started doing it the moment she'd arrived. While her sisters were playing noisily, she was quietly studying English!

I... I... I was speechless. I just stood there. I... I had never seen a 6-year-old focus with that much intensity, for that long, on a real grownup study task. I... I waited till she had finished the whole two pages (without looking up even once!), when she ruled fresh lines on the next two pages and held it up to me, asking me to print some new English words on the left. I... I... I said: This is fantastic! You are amazing! You are ... This is... Wow... and so forth, at which the other two girls looked up to see what all the praise was about, and later after dinner, when they were about to watch the Wizard of Oz they insisted on watching it in English.

Later, when Kasumi came to pick them up and take them home across the Lake, they had fallen asleep... Out in the car Miasa lifted a sleepy hand and said "My notebook..." She'd left it by the warm wood stove, where she'd been ruling in more lines, just before falling asleep...

My English fails me...

SUPERVISITATION

Heard an odd sound outside yesterday afternoon, like a small mob of elves sneaking over a field of pink and green marshmallows as quietly as they could while dragging bags full of giggles, hoping to surprise an unsuspecting grandfatherly person who lives in a house on the side of a mountain in an oriental countryside, so I did what any such elderperson would do in similar circumstances: I put my ear to the door, the better to grasp the situation and make counter-surprise preparations, when the bell rang serially just as the door was pulled wide open and the entire living room filled up with squeals as I was engulfed in fresh cold air filled with six arms of three granddaughters who varoomed in through the doorway like a sixlegged yellstorm and whirled around me in the cutest smiling vortex I ever saw, hugging me all over and yelling Bobu-san! and caroming off to bounce around the big room, looking up and down and around to see what had changed and what was still there, while I spun a moment in the vestibule trying to slow my whirl so I could see and walk, talk and so forth. Then we got down to the intense part of the visit, where things happen really fast.

BRIGHTFACE AND FRIENDS

The trio of grandies Kaya, Miasa and Mitsuki arrived from across the Lake late yesterday afternoon in a big van full of themselves (driven by their lovely mother Kasumi) and amazed me with their growing and maturing-- living proof that miracles are perfectly natural.

They brought with them the usual bunch of puzzles that attend grandfathering a cluster of lightbeings, such as what to do first or is there a first-- but no problem in this case-- as always, I immediately took them out into the garden where they love to rummage (which they don't get to do in their pro tem city apartment), especially in summer when everything is green and the spicy air of late day is so rich with fragrances ("Let's walk up the road, too!" they yelled when we got outside).

Of course I right away had to show them the long green carpet of basil - they're basil fanatics - and over there was the opportunistic watermelon, growing meters and meters in length out of a seed left in the compost pile (on whose original bouncy heap of rustly autumn leaves the three girls had giggly danced just last autumn), they ooohd and aaaahd at the softball-sized green baby watermelon that looks so cute snuggling there in the grass where the vine climbs over the stacks of shiitake logs on its pale green way up into the cedars, then they sniffed the lemon verbena - there are ritual steps to the garden re-acclimation process - then into the garden proper with the towering tomatoes, green wall of goya and climbing green beans, gangly sunflowers, leftover turnips and amazing butternut squashes getting bigger and bigger but hiding under those huge leaves, the trio showing me where they've just gotten new mosquito bites, we picked some green beans, Morocco beans and tomatoes, checked out the goya flowers up close - the three LOVE goya!

Then they sniffed the ginger leaves, checked out the baby green peppers, which were "Cuuuuute!", tickled the tiny green feathers of the new carrots and got mad at the monkeys who stole the older carrots that they themselves could have picked right now; then we walked over and talked for a while with Brightface, the biggest Sunflower in the garden, who nodded to the girls and asked a few questions about being human and good and going to school, told them some nice stuff about being a flower and having fun even being so tall and thin and with no feet, here among all his vegetable friends, it was a grand life, following the sun. And it wasn't my hand moving the big blossom or my voice saying those words with a sunflowery accent. Pay no attention to that man beside the sunflower.

Didn't matter, the girls liked their conversation with Brightface. Lots of green and purple shiso frilling around too, they also love shiso. They love everything, I think. They squeally enjoyed diving into the high wide tomato bushes to get at the gemmy rednesses in there and putting them in the basket one by one with the bunch of beans, then we headed back up to the deck to plan the tent, which they'd been calling for all along but forgot as soon as there were snacks.

New minds move fast.

THE PAST, THE FUTURE AND ALL THAT STUFF

Another of the many and unexpectedly great funs of having grandies is the letters they now and then send like young bursts of life as they learn to write and want to communicate to us all the important events in the rush of their daily lives.

We just got a bright envelope full of little pages in all colors, shapes and sizes from Mitsuki, who appears to be quite the epistolarian: pages from little cartoony notebooks, kitty postits, pages with ice cream cone stickers stuck on them, bits of paper with drawings on them of grownups, kids, trees and animals, all scribed all over with kiddy thoughts meticulously wrangled out of a language's newlearned lettering... It's fun, intriguing and ultimately endearing to puzzle out the scripted elements of a cute new life learning about the world, the past, the future and all that stuff, just like you yourself did. And are doing, as you read.

One of Mitsuki's miniletters says she is well and asks are we also, the end, she seems to think that all her grandparents live together and intermingle all the time, she hasn't got that figured out yet like older sister Kaya has, without ever asking anybody about the facts of it all-- give Mitsuki and sister Miasa another year or two. It's astonishing each time you realize anew all the things kidlets have to learn - and do learn, without even trying - it all just falls into place in their heads and hearts, and they write about it now and then.

And in the inner sanctum of the cartoonly colored envelope bearing a cluster of interesting drawn-on stamps surrounding the genuine but uninteresting stamp, there is a treasurously small packet of paper wrapped and folded and wrapped some more that clearly contains something special and says on it Bob & Echo, and after unwrapping and unfolding and unwrapping all the layers that tiny hands love to take the time to place upon their treasures to keep them safe, there at the heart are four tiny glass beads of different colors: two for me and two for Echo.

This weekend I'll make a two-bead string necklace and wear it. Nothing like a bit of love around your neck.

WALKING WITH A CHILD
From the PLM archives, February 2004

When you go for a walk with a child, as I do so often with Kaya when she comes to visit (it's a crime to keep new legs indoors all day in a house in the country, to say nothing of legs that have some mileage) it is best to let the child lead, because then you are reminded - in case you had forgotten - of all the yearning and learning and true adventure there is in every single minute of life.

Seeds, weeds, roads, where did the berries go, holding pods, who made this path, what is the frost, where are the deer, if there are rabbits why can't we see them and what kind of trees are those, when do the acorns fall and what is that, sensing wild beasts large and small out there unseen but living and moving - how stirring and inspiriting it all is in truth, with a nice little bit of trepidation - and if you are paying attention in any real way, and not merely serving as an accompanying corporeal presence (perhaps, heaven forbid, an authoritarian representative of some kind) you must drop everything you've got going on way up there in the heady heights and come down to where the adventure is, return for a time to the child you once were (perhaps sadly orphaned all these decades).

When you go for a walk with a child you'd best not be all tenterhooked with expectation and directed with direction, because with a child in the lead, or even in tow, you never know the turnings you'll take (children can turn on an atom at any level) or where your twofold path will lead. That's another gift children give, in recalling to you the true grace of realworld paths: that they can lead anywhere, a grace so easy to forget after years of advance on cut-to-the-chasedly optimized career etc. paths, with their cradle-to-grave governmental perspective.

That is the very same amnesia by which you may have forgotten that you too were once able to go wherever you pleased, a privilege you now realize, with a pang of some proportion, was a valuable privilege indeed: however could you have given that up, you might ask yourself, among the many other questions you haven't asked in a long while, perhaps even never before. And maybe as a result you'll hear the answers you've always carried inside, until before too long wherever you go it is as though you are walking with a child.

The way I try to walk when Kaya isn't here.

THE FOOTHILLS OF REASON

Noticed this morning by the crunches underfoot, and in the clarity of sunlight, the impressive quantity of senbei chunks and nori flakes littering certain areas of the floor around the kitchen table, indicating that someone yesterday had been sitting at said table scarfing said items in some quantity-- in fact two someones, judging by the area of rampant and heedless chunkification - someones who were below the Age of Senbei, as I dubbed it during my own parenthood.

The Age of Senbei comes at about the same time as the old Catholic workhorse the Age of Reason, at which age one is qualified to go to hell. (Or heaven, the much less likely option in my case at the time-- and even now, I expect.) As you can see, I've based my age classification on more immediately useful parameters. The Age of Senbei comes a couple of years after the Age of Restaurantability-- the age at which you can take children to a restaurant without them grabbing all the condiments on the table for an essential series of physical tests.

At the Age of Senbei, which is about the age of 7, a child can eat senbei without leaving a physical record of the act all over the vicinity. If Hansel and Gretel had been pre-Senbei, they would have been found at once. Mitsuki and Miasa just turned 5, so that seat there and that seat there is where they sat, as you can easily see. Over there is where Kaya, who just turned 8, was sitting. It is clear by the floor that she is of an age.

If they were here right now, I'd have them clean it up, perhaps accelerate their growth a bit, but kids make great getaways, as the crumbs of yesterday attest. And though the trio is coming to visit in an hour or so, since this is the last day they'll be here - and anyway I trust that the twins will reach the Age of Senbei as certainly and fully as Kaya has - I will say nothing to them of the morning crunches underfoot, I'll just clean it up myself and let them be who they are at the moment, under a life system way older than history.

Which is not to say I won't eyeball M&M if they launch into any senbei-- I have reached the Foothills of Reason, after all.

THE BEST TO YOU

From Pure Land Mountain

SNOWLADIES

Well the grandees arrived yesterday afternoon and, having suffered one long child-year of deep snow deprivation, were unable to get out of the car without squealing and running straight to the snow mountains I'd made in front of the deck and climbing right up and down them over and over for immediate replenishment, in the fever of their delirium making snowballs to throw at anything at all until they came to the next level of their senses and ran en masse to the tool shed - filling their boots with snow at every step, but who cares about feet when there's food for the starving - to get any item at all that could hold snow, like shovels, trowels, buckets etc., then they fanned out into the garden and began to fill in holes and elevate hills and otherwise rearrange the snowscape to their frenzied liking when at some point I mentioned a nice big open snowy slope up in the forest where they might want to go and play, and with one voice of yes they flung their forgotten tools to the ground (where the tools still are, as I notice out the window on the garden) so we all walked upmountain into the forest - actually we adults walked and the kids ran - where we came to a nice clear slope of virgin snow and the three filled the forest with squeals at the sight, a sound most awesome yet somehow quite at home in the sylvan silence, as they ran up the hill arms waving, scarves flying, boots falling off, the hill would be perfect for tobogganning if we had a toboggan but they don't have toboggans in Japan so the snowcovered trio just used their bodies and ran up and slid, rolled, tumbled and galloomphed to the bottom then back up again, quickly exhausting the adults, who at last herded the snowsodden three back through the woods with their snowmelt mittens and icewater boots, I gave one my handwarmer to help her survive till we arrived back at the house with three little melting snowladies who right away gathered by the toasty woodstove and had some hot tea and opened their presents, all without the slightest bit of a fight it was great, we all sat around the low homemade wooden table in front of the stove and had homemade pizza before the kids all took turns wearing the moonmask. A typical first day of the snow cure.

Flashback > from PLM November 2003

A LEAF

After Kaya left a few evenings ago, as I was emptying my pockets before going to bed I found a leaf that she had picked up on our afternoon walk that day, from among all the other leaves lying on the ground. I suppose she had picked it out because of its unusualness in being half crimson and half bright yellow, the colors divided right down the middle of the leaf, had picked it up and given it to me, I had looked at it, and remarked upon it, and thought and I suppose said, in the brief instant of attention young children allow for such things, how special it was that she had seen the very beauty in that particular leaf among all the others. Then I had put the leaf in my pocket and forgotten about it as we continued on our walk. When I found it in my pocket that night, I put it on the table beside my bed. Now for the days since, each time I go to bed at night and each time I rise in the morning the beauty of that leaf, at first so bright and attention-grabbing, has begun to fade a little bit as the red weakens toward brown and the yellow does too. Soon it will be the one color all the other leaves have become, so is grabbing my attention in a different way. It is a little record, there, of the life of all things, once in their greenness, thence to their fullest beauty, that falls in time to the beginning children give to us.

YESTERDAY

Saturday being our last day with the grandies, we (Kasumi, Tatsuya Echo and I) took them to pick blueberries at the blueberry farm (and restaurant) Sora-no-ne, up north and inland from the Lake, where they each filled a container with excitement and blueberries, nibbling on the peak fruit all the while, we grownups enjoying their excitement and the blueberries, helping the trio find the biggest blueberries to pick among the millions of swelling dusky blue globes.

When each of the three had filled her container to the brim, we took them for picnicking, swimming and playing to a place not far from there, their favorite play place, called Kodomo-no-kuni (site link at the link) on the shore of Lake Biwa. It has a big and challenging playground, plus a beach, a pool, a stream, cars you can pedal along roads all around the grounds and lots of other stuff-- the trio love the place; and even better it’s free, except for a 500 yen parking fee. You pretty much have to have a car to get there, though, as far as I know.

When we returned home in the evening the kids went out into the garden, where they discovered the newly dug soil with the post holes around it and asked if they could go in there and walk on it, and go into the post holes - they just had to walk on that fluffy soil and go down into those deep holes - then they discovered the standing sheaf of reeds I had there for marking pole-to-pole distance, and right away turned them into swords and skyreachers and fishing poles, went fishing for imaginary fish in the post holes and caught a few large ones, had us remove the fish from their airhooks and assess their flavor.

Kaya gathered some rocks and made an imaginary fire with all her fish on it and got leaves for spicing and salad while Miasa made soba noodles and Mitsuki made udon noodles, then in the growing dimness one of the twins did what I guess is an instinctive thing for a new female— she pushed one tall reed into the ground and about a meter away pushed another reed into the ground, then stood there before them clicking two sticks together and chanting a song, the other twin soon joining in seamlessly, creating an enchanting and spontaneous song of apparently made-up words.

At the end of the long chant (chant > enchanting: interesting tacit understanding in us modern folk, of how deeply those words connect) she declared to her father and I, who stood at the edge of the garden watching this instantaneous succession of goings on, that this was now a special gateway, and that beyond it was a special room where they could go and do special things. She stood before the gateway and began clacking her sticks again in rhythm with her sister, preparing the room until it was all ready for use, then she went fishing in one of the post holes she hadn’t fished in yet.

Standing there watching in the dimness that gave an aura to their endless spring of imaginings, I couldn’t help but realize the deep and inborn magic that resides in those new spirits; we grownups tend to think it’s all "made up," but seeing the three do their untrained rituals there in the dark at the end of a day, still directly connected to their (and our) source, I was suddenly aware that it’s not made up at all, but is as ancient and true as the seeds of humanity. It wasn’t thought, which is new to each mind, but spiritual instinct, now living on in them—not to be erased or supplanted by education, if I can help it--


All in all, a heartfilling day.