WINGS OF BEAUTY

Scattered over the mountains - the green parts and the stony parts, with little caps of snow at the top - here and there the eye finds puffs of pinkish-white where a cherry tree has somehow managed to be. How did each of them come to brighten there, pastel notes amidst the darker tones of cedar, hinoki, oak, beech, all the other stolid, right-at-home trees?

Cherry tree seeds reached each of those places way up there, in those difficult locations, likely dropped by birds or washed down by rainstreams from a parent tree above, now long gone. Perhaps that's why there are rarely two cherry trees together; they are scattered singly across these mountainsides, in little bursts of pink confetti for this moment at the edge of Spring - roundish wisps of brightness up there, shimmering now in the wind, small celebrations amid the overall somberness of the forest. 

Up there on one mountainside, though, is a single tree that is white, not pink, and not roundish or windshimmery like a cherry-- it is tall and pointed. My handy binoculars tell me it is a tulip tree up there at full bloom, limbs arrayed in natural majesty of the kind that finds its way into royal coats of arms.

The road below us is lined with cherry trees, that at this time of day are lit from behind us by the setting sun, the lake far below darkening blue in the background, sailboats sailing in the shadowed air above the flowering trees. All that beauty, like all the finest beauty - like those blossoms themselves - abides but a moment; then the sun is gone behind the mountains, and all that splendor now is nowhere but in ourselves.

WOODEN HORSES

Out in the blustery dawn loading up on firewood to restock the holder beside the cold morning stove, using the work to get the bodyheat. Eyeing the oak first of course, as I have all these winter days, the old reliable winter fireheart with its hard and long-burning golden flame, taken straight from the sun.

Oak is our best flame for the heart of winter, heats every nook and cranny of this mountain house, but now that I’m warm so quickly out in the morning, it seemed to me that we’ve passed the heart of winter - though it may return for a passing shove or two of its icy shoulders - so out of habit I was eyeing the big firepower of oak I have out there, turning that gold they get when they’re ready to give back the sun, but then I catch a glimpse of the other stacks, the lighter fiery ones of cherry wood, with that flamey red they dry to, that glows in the morning light and in the stove burns so happily, so friendly flickery...

It’s hard to describe without getting too cute, but cherry is the perfect wood for blustery days because it’s warm in other ways than heat, like a grandma serving cookies and cocoa in front of the fire; it gives back a spritely, cheery kind of flame, long-embered but not strong, not the let’s-get-to-work kind of deep-tempered, hard-edged fire that oak brings to the room when there’s ice on the windows, oak like iron, the workhorse of firewood, the Percheron of flame, its big muscles hauling us all across winters of ice...

After a decade or two with a woodstove on a mountainside with a wide supply of wild windblown wood you get to be kind of a firewood gourmet, it’s like wine or coffee in its way, with body, bouquet, hints of this and that quality, each kind of wood, indeed each tree, having its own character that it’s best to know as best you can, and as I scanned the stacks something spoke to me from inside like the urgevoice that says “Boy, a cup of coffee sure would hit the spot right now,” or “A bit of Puligny-Montrachet would really go good with this meal,” as the conjurevision of the topic shows itself the mind’s eye and that’s what I saw, some cherry wood burning in the stove just minutes from now, with the sky turning the same color outside and the chill wind blowing by, rattling the bamboo, all souled by the cherry flame and the wine color of the dawning sun, it would just all fit together better than it would with oak, I thought, and it did, what can I say, I’ve tried in these awkwords.

Anyway, as to cherry, brighten just one letter and it's cheery...

CHERRY MOODS

Yesterday was a day off, and when I walked out into the garden in the early morning the cherry tree was like a different person, it was so polite and considerate in its pinkly fluent majesty-- not a trace of irony anywhere in its blossomy mannerisms or the gestures of its elegant limbs; its perfume even had my name on it.

As I worked in the garden in the rich morning air the tree's blossom-clad limbs hovered over me considerately, shading me from the sun, the entire tree emanating a magical light blended effortlessly from the basic materials of sun and blue sky-- it made working in the garden even more of a pleasure than usual.

But then this morning, when again I had to head downmountain and off to work in the Big City, as I passed through the village the arcade of blooming cherry trees that lines the road to the station looked pretty flippant, flaunting their whole roadful of perfumed beauty in the same saucy and ironic way they had on Tuesday.

The cherries have really been moody lately. Either that or the mere prospect of an office can warp reality.

EYES AND OAK

As hinted at in various of these eclectic chronicles, the experiences of a freelance editor attempting to live in simple modernity out in the Japanese countryside can be surreal when the simple and modern converge head-on (in my head) at times such as today, when, after splitting a stack of firewood in the cool of the morning I came into the house to have at the waiting stack of pages and had to get at the grain of the suggestion that monocular diplopia arises from secondary astigmatism in combination with spherical aberration, whereas monocular triplopia arises from trefoil in combination with spherical aberration.

As the two experiences blend organically in said head, at some deeper level that I have no time to fathom at the moment I surmise that both diplopia and triplopia have much in common with cherry bark and the grain of oak. I’ll get out my mental wedge later and see if this mindwood will split and dry, make a viable flame.

Bright sadness
laces the morning air -
cherry petal journeys

AFTERWOOD

Spent this afternoon quartering and stacking bucked locust and cherry wood from an up-mountain neighbor with too much unthinned forest on his land (locust, a very clean very white light wood, burns hot and fast and is great for burning in a wood stove before and after regular fires to clean the stovepipe; a lot of such useful info at Woodheat).

Just before dusk when I'd finished the last of the cherry wood (great fundamental cherryish fragrance), full of the pleasure a high stack of great-sounding red and white wood affords, I meandered across the road to where one farmer had trimmed his paddy slope to the smoothness of a golf green, and I laid there on one elbow looking at the Lake and mountains and the sky as the evening mountain air mixed with the setting sun poured down over me with a coolness just barely this side of water. What a pleasure.

The forest all along the mountain curve was spotted with dots of red, yellow, purple and gold, trees just beginning to turn with the season. Further off, two crows flew north, straight toward the pot of gold, disappearing right at the point where now turns into then.