Stinkbug Winters

Folks around here kept mentioning the overabundance of kamemushi this autumn - though in my opinion more than one kamemushi is overabundance - and it recalls to me what one of the wives of the fields across the road said to us the summer we first moved into our new house here, how there were a lot of kamemushi this year - there'd been practically none of those bugs in Kyoto - so there would be heavy snows that winter, and so it proved, big time.

The snow out here had been impressive the previous winter, but it was so heavy our first winter in the new house that only a tracked vehicle could have made it all the way up. The first early snowfall was over a meter, and the snowtop stayed up to my waist all winter. There was only a walking path up the mountain road, up and down which the mailman walked each day, the folks up here using sleds to pull their provisions (food, kerosene) up to their houses.

We newbie city slickers had a 2-wheel drive vehicle (for the last time), so we definitely had to park down below the school and walk up too, but we loved it all: the snow, the solitude, the silence, the vistas...  All that snow on the ground throughout the winter was a welcome challenge, and nothing better for a woodstove fire, warming us at the heart of white...    

Since then (almost 20 years now) we haven't had anything like that snow, or anything like those swarms of kamemushi (in the laundry, in your safety glasses, inside your just-laundered sweatshirt, in your salad, in your coffee. Until this year. At the first unfold last week of a firewood tarp that had been in the tool shed I counted 50 kamemushi, in the second unfold, I lost count, third unfold why bother countin, fourth looks like big snow comin.

Now I get to see if kamemushi walk the walk.

CONVERSATIONS WITH PEPPERS

Only carnivorously tabloid reporters and hyperlonely folks with no vegetable friends make fun of gardeners who talk to their plants. Look at what happened to Prince Charles. He stopped admitting it, speaks to vegetative bodies only in private now, except perhaps when he addresses parliament.

But the fact is that all gardeners talk to their plants, especially in early winter, like me this morning when I was walking the rows clearing the gray stalks and wilted vines, harvesting what I could and pausing to amaze over the stalwart peppers, especially the incipient ones huddled on thin stems trying to become green in the cold. 

Peppers originated in warm climates, so cold is not their friend, but they were literally hangin' in there, the younger, smaller, yet still piquant ones that, despite their brave efforts, were beginning to turn yellow as though they were holding their breath. Under the pitiful circumstances, who with a beating heart could simply walk by these wannabe succulent emerald lives and say nothing? Any such folk should not be gardening, for they hold no esteem in the vegetable world. Agrobizzers, likely.

I could only sympathize and be thankful to the virtually shivering capsicums for all their efforts, as for example the savor they gave to my chili last week, but for all that green shivering it was a pretty one-sided conversation. Still, I could make out some words of their language, which is not subject to the limitations of mere sound like ours, but takes the form of light and color; thus no need for crude lips or vocal chords. Most of what I could make out from their side was in the nature of “Get me out of here!” Which I did.

Our conversations were therefore brief, as I went down the rows emanating pepperish gratitude as best I could, knowing that any buds left in place would grow no more, now that the cold was waxing fast. I harvested whoever was of sliceable size, to help me continue with my life; the rest would become part of next years' proud summer pepper chorus.

Peppers do appreciate an audience.

THE COUNTRY SIDE OF LIFE

When you move from the city into the country, a considerable number of municipally peripheral things suddenly come into your life in a big way, such as the moon and the stars. Also insects, trees and animals, not to mention the sky as a whole. As well general vegetation, and a welcome absence of the masses of concrete and asphalt and people that characterize city life, as do power and phone lines overhead.

The moon doesn't play much of a role in city life, except as a kind of urban add-on one sees occasionally that is played up in movies as an extravaganza backdrop, the moon coming up between the skyscrapers. City folks actually don't have all that much to do with the moon, let alone the stars, except in a mythico-cinematico-derivativo kind of way, isn't it mystical, they say in the park, that smattering of artificial countryside city folks resort to in their free time to evoke their roots with a distant wistfulness, as in a museum where you can touch the artifacts. And the sky---in the city the sky is pretty much an artifact too, the less significant part of what metropolitans call the "skyline." Isn't it impressive they say. Well, yeah, I guess so, if you like artifacts in your eye.

Out in the country the sky stretches all the way from here to there (not the city "here and there"; such words resume their original meaning out in the country). And of course the country is where birds actually live, and enjoy themselves. By birds I don't mean panhandling pigeons, but self-supporting warblers, wheatears, grosbeaks, ducks, thrushes, egrets, pheasants, finches, redstarts, hawks, swallows, wagtails, owls, the list goes on. Real birds. Not merely the species or two that can tolerate exhaust fumes for a discernable life span, like the trees the city inserts along the avenues.

And insects---not cockroaches, which can live anywhere, the pigeons of the insect family---but genuine broad-spectrum insects, buzz and hum and crawl, all going about their ancient business in their traditional ways in holes and hills and hives or just plain on the ground (there's actual ground out in the country) to the chirpings and trillings of cricket and katydid as evening comes, and through the night, the fragrant night, and then at dawn vast webs are strung with beads of dew and hung with warbler notes in the pink sunrise from way down at the bottom of the sky.

Then in the spring and summer eves and morns the oratorio of the frogs of course, in their timeless worship of all things high and low, which worship, in all its many forms, goes on all the time in the country but is pretty much extinct in the city, and then there's the occasional snake draped over a branch in the sun like this was the garden of Eden or something, not to mention glimpses of ferret fox boar stag raccoon monkey bear, and there are actual fish in the waters, waters which by the way in the country you can drink without even once thinking of wet laundry.

And fireflies, of a summer night! Or a rainy summer night, when the underneaths of leaves are lit by thousands of tiny lanterns as the firefly party goes on despite the downpour. Rain, too, in the country is different from rain in the city, where it is a wet bothersome thing serving no natural function (except maybe to water the park), only an artificial one when in the summer it sometimes brings desperately needed relief to what city officials and I guess everybody by now calls heat island syndrome, which is when the sun and the city work together to form a kind of sidewalk inferno. And I probably don't need to point out the difference between a city summer night and a country summer night, nor dwell at length on the differences between the other seasons as experienced in these respective locales, but I will.

In the country summer the nights are cool, there is tree breath everywhere and you can breathe its perfume beneath a sky broadcast with all the diamonds of the universe for you, and you sleep better too, since you're so much more at home, because we all came from the country. And when autumn arrives, who can describe what is more beautiful than all the masterpieces of all the museums in the world put together? This is the very beauty painters chase to the grave. And this isn't just oils on canvas on walls in museums next to the park; this is the real thing, you can go out and walk right in it for hours, and there's no admission fee.

Then comes the country winter, with its majestic, sweeping calligraphies of snow just sitting there on silent show, gleaming with sunlight for days and weeks in tree- and stubble- and furrow- and grove-shaped whiteness-impeccable sculptures, and the blue-blue air is so big that the snow show is but a small part of it all, and not in the way, as it is in the city where pretty soon after snow falls and makes headlines it gets slushy and ugly or dangerously icy; country snow, soft and plush, is by contrast a big down comforter mother nature always throws over the countryside about this time, and whereas in the city the snow merely treacherizes pedestrians and vehicularians, and taxes the sewage system with often excessive volumes of what is called "runoff," in the country snow has actual natural functions, among others of insulating the soil from the chill of late winter and watering it in spring the way spring is in the country, for in the country spring is exactly where it belongs, its green songs up out of the ground swelling in time into chorales of wildflowers and all kinds of random demonstrations of the beauty nature can build if left on its own, the way it is out in the country.

MIND SEASONS

It's interesting how, when I'm freewheeling down the road these hot summer mornings, glad for the breeze of speed even at this early hour, wearing just a t-shirt, sometimes with a shirt over it by way of temperature trial, the tasking part of my mind is doing its work of steering and braking the bike around the mountain curves, while the idle part of my mind sort of just rides up there on my shoulders in its summer self, can't-believing as we roll along in this heat that in the winter, on this same journey, this same body wears long underwear, t-shirt, thick shirt, sweater, thick jacket, scarf, gloves, thick socks under hefty shoes as it freezes on down the road, the summer mind then recalling that in winter it becomes the winter mind dreaming of those unimaginably warm days, when it thinks: is it really possible, did this same body actually roll down this mountain in summertime wearing just a t-shirt? The summer mind then comes back to its summer self and ponders the impossibility of wearing all that winter stuff in this heat-- Does it really get that cold? Ice on this road?

Impossible here on this ice-free road with flowers all around, golden rice heads drooping over the shoulders, overhanging green branches of trees, the body wearing just a light open shirt over a t-shirt and jeans, beginning to sweat in the morning heat, thankful for the travel wind, looking forward to the nearing days of autumn and winter as it becomes cool and cooler even unto cold, and thick jackets...

Thus my idle mind and I roll down the road through the years and the seasons of world and mind, never completely immersed in any particular season or world at all... Life will always yearn for summer in winter and back and forth... What would I do without seasons...

And if it isn't seasons, the mind will find something else to remember back and forth to...

SLOW LIFE

How like our own rooted life, the slow life of the land. The paddies are all shorn now, the gifts of sun, rain and earth have been taken home. The fields lie golden in the slanting light of the last of day, the cut stalks yet sending up new shoots in timeless green hope, vested in the same faith we accord tomorrow.

Their shearing marked the end of summer, now their turning marks the end of fall. All the more beauteous for their loss of glory, the paddies gild the mountainside.

They are done now, these fields, unattended but by the wood doves, who come in pairs to search for overlooked grains, until soon the long white sleep of winter begins again to ready the land for spring, as it readies ourselves.