UBERVINE

A week or so ago I noticed a vigorous plant emerging from the edge of the compost pile, it was thick and vigorous, likely an opportunistic pumpkin or some kind of melon, though the leaves seem too big and the plant itself too largish for a canteloupe-type melon; watermelon maybe? In any case, I have never seen a plant that was healthier, and happier to be whatever it is.

Its seeds were thrown out with the kitchen garbage sometime during the last year, and just one of them waited patiently in the perfectly moist warmth and optimal nutrition of natural compost to make its long green sinuous statement across the top of the mouldering leaves, clinging to net here, curlicuing to pole there, bamboo stalk there, probably climb the cherry tree as well, before too long...

No sign yet of a fruiting body and not even an open flower (my butternut squash plants in the garden proper, about the same age, are already showing mini-squashes beneath nascent blossoms) on what looks like a mature plant-- it seems to grow a couple feet in length each day, reaching from its starting point at the front corner of the compost pile (contained in a square by a net, one side open) as it twines through and through and over the net, heading south toward where the most sun is-- being by nature hardy to begin with, the sole survivor from a large family of original seeds.

Also, since it's growing outside my soon-to-be-electrified garden fence, I'm curious to find out what kind of fruit the monkeys will get.

LIFE TO THE DAY

This late September afternoon and evening I'm out running around with one arm plus, sectioning, sorting and stacking a mountain of firewood we got from some landscaper guys who were scaping the grounds of a house for sale down the mountain, we asked if they could bring the firewoody results to our house (they're glad to, rather than drive several loads of wood all the way to a landfill or incinerator), so they dumped logs and long branches of ironwood, oak, beech, locust and black pine in front of the deck on Thursday night, and twice more today.

It always surprises me how heavy ironwood is, just a 30 cm diameter yard-long chunk makes you take an extra breath and then lift again for real-- I'm being careful with the one arm plus, though one could get carried away at the sight of so much free heat to put in the bank, but I have my limits and I listen for them, the arm whispers to me in the edgy lingo of early pain, then I stop.

But I got a lot done today nevertheless, also started another of my patented Brady Cedar-tree firewood holders - have those tall, green sophisticated presences do something more than look beautiful, put those strong slim bodies to work, get some muscle on those grainy bones, thereby freeing up our metal firewood holder for winter use on the deck, which was part of the plan -

In the midst of all these hitherings amidst the rough bark and grain, through the grays and browns and fading greens and crisping leaves, with the right-on-time blossoms of higanbana rising straight up, standing around like squads of cardinals watching a priest do all the work, I couldn't help but notice the extreme oddness of a big beautiful delicate yellow summer flower coming up from the nowhere of tall unkempt grass that's always by the garden faucet, no place for such a flower, out of time too, for when I looked closer with an armful of ironwood I saw that it was a melon flower, a golden mist of a blossom grown from a seed dropped some time during the summer when I was washing the kitchen sink garbage strainer (after dumping the contents on the compost pile over by the cherry tree).

And so an opportune packet of life took advantage of the household situation to show the immediate world what a melon seed can do on its own amidst hard labor and punctilious bloomings, and what a beauty it was, all the more precious for being so out of place and time: a summer melon blossoming in Autumn, a flowery martyrdom up here on the mountain, quiet little facet of the mystery, offering its bright life on the fading day...

YAYOI PICNIC REMNANT

I had a piece of melon just the other day - the summer melons are starting to come in from the farms in Kyushu and further south - nothing like a sweet, cool slice of melon on a picnic.

The same was apparently true a couple thousand years ago here in Shiga Prefecture, just across Lake Biwa in fact, in the small neat and classy town of Moriyama - oddly with no website of its own - which as of yesterday holds the world's oldest melon record.

Moriyama stands on the site where some Yayoi villagers lived and just tossed away the melon rinds on their picnics - who cared in those days, knowing that all would be taken care of by nature - never suspecting the problem that garbage would one day become, or that this particular melon rind, so casually tossed away as Yayoi garbage, would in that very same one day be an archaeological treasure; that a couple of millennia hence a professional in the unknown and as yet unnecessary career field of archaeology would with her trowel painstakingly excavate the melon rind intact and the discovery would be worldwide news, the melon pictured on the inconceivable internet...

Like melons, picnics can turn out to be pretty historic.