TRYING TO SEE

This morning was way over its head in the Spring mist, which is great because when you're moving about in a cool blanket of vapor you have to try and see farther, which would be better to do all the time, but being human we are often too deeply involved with shallow concerns...

Still, it’s always welcome to be challenged by a physical mist, as opposed to mists psychogenic, mediagenic, politicogenic etc., so there I was whiling my time on the train platform, peering at the mountains, trying for the summits, here and there on their faint green slopes a bright cherry or tulip tree exulting despite the curtain of haze; then I turned the other way and looked out over the Lake, the mythic lake, where dragons and silver live in the shimmers, the water surface that morning just disappearing not far into the mist, no one knows how far precisely, all silvergrey and cool, that dull bright disc up there making it all squinty if I looked too high so I looked low and saw that Lakeside rice paddy preparations are well under way, here in the lowlands-- some are even tilled and ready for the planting, their green shoulders smooth as velvet...

Then I heard what sounded like the whine of a weed whacker down there somewhere; I looked to see, and right about where the sound seemed to come from I noticed on the high shoulder of a deep paddy an obachan's (grandma's) walker cart (the commercial euphemism is "Silver Car," but I suspect the obachan underground has its own name for these wheels-- (obaguruma?)) standing there as out of place as can be: what semi-ambulatory grandma would walk her wheels way out there into the weedy unpaved, heavy labor workplace?

Nowadays, all the Japan ladies of a certain age, bent by the tribulations and deprivations of living and childbearing through and after the war, use these wheeled carts to lean on when they amble about the country ways or go shopping at the village stores, and to sit on when they need a rest. Odd to see one of those carts sitting out there...

The grandmas do take part in the work at harvest time, when they can be very useful with their decades of know-how and their long practice at focused energy, but now it’s all muscle time, so what can they do at this point-- and where is that weed whacker noise coming from? 

It was coming from around there... Then in the mist I saw the top of the head of someone above the paddy verge, just one person out there in the mist, working on a bit of a slope that hid whoever it was, the head moved upward, the shoulder was swinging - a weed whacker - then a bit more and it was indeed an elder lady, owner of that cart and bent of back... 

She must have brought that whacker all the way out there on her cart, started that gas-powered tool, bigger than she was, all by herself with a hefty pull or two or more, and was still swinging it back and forth, bent over as she moved up and along the paddy shoulder, working toward her walking cart, mowing down weeds, making way for rice. Those elderladies get more impressive every time I look.

Glad the mist made me try to see.

WATERY FLAMES

And this morning too, after the nights’ rain I watched in the cooling dawn the vapor rise in great white gouts like reaching hands, a dance of cloudy spirals and watery flames above the deeper mist veiling the backdrop of the darker mountains, plunging into abrupt and sinuous relief the formerly two-dimensional dawnscape, scribing ridges, defiles, groves and the taller, ancient trees with the stroke of a mist-brush plied with the grace of a dancer, the dancer that turns in all water, leaps in all sky.

THE POWERFUL HANDS OF RAIN

I desperately wanted to get up early this morning, I had so many things to do-- make a fire in the stove and have breakfast before hunkering down to a couple of urgent early editing deadlines so I could get a headstart on some long-overdue outdoor work, which would have been great on several levels, but the powerful hands of the heavy spring rain cascading from the top of the sky onto the roof and forest around, and the irresistible veils of mist floating by outside the window pinned me to the bed so strongly that I could barely move my eyelids. Frustrating, to say the least.

I struggled valiantly for nanoseconds, but in vain one opposes the powers of nature; the musical power of the rain was so torrential that I barely managed to turn over - the better to bear the euphonic pressure - briefly rearranging my pillow to optimally cushion my head against the misty forces and tuck the blankets in place around my shoulders so as to at least maintain essential toastiness while suffering forced immobility, so that my frustration would not seem so severe. Sometime soon, god willing, the rains would slow and the mist would clear, then I would be able to get up and at last set out toward fulfilling my numerous responsibilities.

I was so restrained I couldn’t even tap my foot in impatience, so I didn’t bother trying. It took quite a while, big strength of character and a series of excellent dreams before I was able to overcome the multiply faceted insistence of nature, open my eyes to slits and struggle up onto one elbow, from which height I was able to determine that additional winks was the superior choice.

He who would follow the natural course of springtime must be decisive.