LILACS

The rice is all planted, the grandmas are out in the paddies, planting the green shoots by hand in places the machines missed, and likely recalling the unbelievable ago, when entire mountainsides were planted by hand.

Out in the same morning, watering some seedling flats, I am inspired with the fragrance of the blooming lilac and swirled into my own past, just standing there; it makes a tree of me.

There is love in the scent of lilacs; a sweet perfume that knew me kindly, long before I came to be. I get to enjoy Springly nuances from other vegetation as well, the way life moves with chlorophyll. They speak in their own quiet languages, but we communicate; we definitely communicate.

I have learned how important water is to ginger; turnips also request water at certain times, kohlrabi is fussy about the tenderness of the soil, broccoli and pepper have opinions about temperature, and so on. In their gentle way, they help diminish the number of things I'm not sure of.

SPRING IN THE BLOOD

Here at the end of an overcast day of digging, raking, garden-readying, cleaning after the wind stampede, gathering windfall branches for this Winter's years kindling, amplifying the grunge by handweeding, gathering spinach for dinner, restacking a big pile of wind-and-monkey-toppled shiitake and hiratake logs (a few biggening mushrooms as reward, to go with the spinach), at last comes the rain that has pent up there in the gray all day-- the first real Spring rain of the year, a gentle falling in drops you can barely hear (the bamboos beneath stand quiet as the dusk), all bringing to the Big Soul the same mood that calls blossoms up from the ground, makes already daffodils bounce with brightness in their green corner, sets the plum and cherry branches with tiny opals and rubies, soon to open in glories beyond price, making even spring-busy humans pause in their motions and gaze into the quiet distance in search of what must be there, now and then taking a deep breath of it all, with a look in the eyes that rises from ancient human-Spring relations, an inborn love of calm. Ah, the ancient privilege it is, to savor these moments and the food they are, to the Winter-hungered heart...

STILLNESS

Nothing like the stillness of a mountain rice paddy on a calm early May dawn, like this one. The paddies up here have by now been flooded, harrowed to readiness and let to wait with the infinite patience of water.

So it is that these fine days the mirroring mountainside is full of blue sky, passing clouds, now-and-then rainrings and rainbows, the mountains themselves, airy grace of hawks, curlicues of swallows and after sunset our entire universe, gliding over at a night's pace. But for now in this emerging morning it is a rare, pure stillness. You can stand here long and gaze at the sight, let it fill you with your own stillness, that brings to the front of mind a number of things that for some reason were stored way at the back...

Now and then, as so often with actual still life, along comes a slight breeze that shivers the water, scrambling the view till a new calm comes. In other nows and thens comes a crow or a hawk to walk the water, sending out perturbations with each hungry step, or up pokes a frog for a breath and a look around at the newday world, after a night of full-hearted amphibian carousing that I caught part of when I came home from the city last night, fell asleep to, woke up in mid-night to, then went back to sleep to. Like the sight of the widening rings and the feel of the reach of stillness, the sound is kin to the natural mind.

It is a good thing to have such a gift at my door for a few days every Spring at about this time, to re-mind me with the bounty that stillness is, nourishing to all around it, a truth that water knows as fully as anything can be known. Folks who have no time for such vastness might as well just stare at some kind of small screen.

Stillness begets all true nourishment, including rice.

PHENOMENAL

Fell asleep last night wearing that pleasant smile I get when I drift into dreams in full expectation of waking to the wonderful sound of spring rain upon the rising green of the waking land, only to learn once more that I am too free with my faith in weather forecasts.

When I awoke, the whole thing, i.e., the entire environment, was just pendant out there in some kind of pressured metabalance: clouds, trees, earth, the whole shebang, combined in that deep stasis you get at certain moments of the year, that heavy silence of imminence where everything there is just feels like hangin for a while, feels good to stretch-- ahh, this is great, it all seems to say in its intricate wordlessness. 

So as the atmosphere was having some laid-back good time I did the same on my own bed, then - lacking the patience of weather - got up and had my breakfast, only a while later noticing that it must have been raining for some time! The weather had pulled another one: the deck was wet, the rain more like a whisper than the lyrical cascades implied by the weather forecast only yesterday.

One way or another, the difference between yesterday and today is always phenomenal.

FAMILY

Standing out on the deck this morning in the chill breeze from the north, cooling off after a long, sweaty task involving stones, as I stood in the shallows of my immediate self with all its discomfort and other rightnow problems of oh, so many complex kinds, my body took its usual first deep, welcome breath after heavy physical labor and my nose lifted me to full delight in the sudden beauty of weeping-cherry blossom fragrance, from deep back in all time... a message from the ancestors...

MEETINGS WITH MYSELF

Being frequently alone up here I have a lot of these meetings, especially lately, what with the weird weather and with pushing well into my seventies, when new questions come up at an accelerating pace, like where in hell did I put that fill in the blank. Plus it's been oddly cold for early April days; my life habit takes it tacitly to be November or so, with snow in the offing and winter ahead, wants me to eat warm calorific foods and snuggle out of reach of aimless winds and fitful rains. 

It's as though the atmosphere can't keep track of the calendar. Lately the weather seems to have gone to the dark side, but that’s just me looking out the window into the steely air, holding a meeting as the cherry blossoms try to remember what they're supposed to do at around this time every year and how. Happens to us all. 

It's confusing as well to the shiitake, who were completely suckered by that 10 minutes or so of sudden warmthiness that happened earlier in the month. Spring can be so cynical. At the feel of it, many of the newly emerged and naive shiitake came running into almost full mushroomhood completely naked, only to realize 10 minutes later that the sudden northerly wind was effing cold, what is this, and they right away wanted to go back to nubhood, but of course they couldn't, once you’re a mushroom, you're a mushroom. Talk to immigration.

The ancient mushroom code is extremely strict about this, so all the shivering newbies can do at that point is what we ourselves would do if we were full out in the frigid air on a log on a mountain somewhere completely naked, which is stop it right there, do not invest another iota of energy in growth, forget about it, just hunker down forever, because this is it! 

It's not pretty, but as I say the shroom laws are firm on this point-- buncha permanently hunkering mushrooms out there now, and speaking of firmness, those hunkerees acquire a wondrous texture that human teeth - which I and many of my acquaintances still happen to have - find most toothsome indeed.

Now back to my meeting.  

THE MESSAGE OF THE GOLDEN PHOENIX

For those of us who grew up before the inception of “real time” (and its nevermentioned dark twin “fake time”), the old myths still have a way of coming into life when you least expect them, like the other afternoon when I was folding my underwear. Generally not a mythic moment, but things stopped being “general” when I moved here. 

Actually the whole episode had started that morning, when I was opening an upstairs window to let in more of this luscious new air and saw The Lord of the Entire Moment strutting nobly, iridescent chest out, along the King’s Way (past my woodpile) as though tossing gold coins to imaginary mobs of worshipful subjects lining the path to my compost heap.

Royalty can, as we know, be oblivious to reality, though I wasn't thinking about that at the time, I was thinking Wow, he looks like he’s been prepped for something big, is he ever sleek, and in magnificent array-- but why is he just wandering aimlessly around his personal mountain gardens, to a small portion of which I happen to hold a mere paper deed?

 Not long after that, as the revelation unwound, from a back window upstairs where I was addressing said underwear, I saw, I swear, emerging from the forest, a shimmering Golden Phoenix illumined by the sun, the shining presence strolling nonchalantly, yet with supreme grace, out into the light as if to greet the world with revelations worthy only of a gleaming Golden Phoenix. This was way bigger than my underwear.

I was facing west, so the sun was fully in my eyes, making the phoenix a golden silhouette with a such blinding aura that I couldn't tell what kind of creature it was, other than that it was alive, but since it was a phoenix it had to be a bird-- one can be pretty convinced even at the edge of a myth, and this was a myth, right?

The presence came stepping nobly out of the dark woods like a good myth might, the brightest of light right out of the dark, lowdown and streamlined, rich with mythos, bearing a spiritual message... The truth came following closely a few seconds later when also came His Noble Self himself - long live the Lord of the Mountain - now just plain loping along, lusting after what must be, I realized, a vavavoom Marilyn-Ava-Rita blend of young hen pheasant, making the absolute most of the moment and its ambient light, who now did a fast u-turn and ran squawking back into the forest, barely managing to stay out of his lordship’s beaky reach and lusty clutches as she disappeared into the dimness, heavy-breathing nobility hot on her heels. 

Then I noticed that the forest floor and meadow ground all around was alive with bouncing birds of several kinds, including numerous thrushes tossing leaves aside while ogling each other, as the the King and his on-and-off consort continued running in and out of the woods while a warbler trilled somewhere with all his heart, and I finally got what Spring was trying to say.

TIDES OF DAYS

   

The longer I've lived here, the more I've come to delight in that brief time of Spring when the wintered mountainside becomes more and more facets of blue sky as the paddies fill, until for a brief time before rice planting, from certain perspectives - like my front doorway - the sky is all over the ground.

Then come the little astonishments of lifetimes, like the early Spring morning when you walk out of the house into a mountain mist and behold upon that long watermirror the pale-green rows of just-planted rice shoots, stretching away into the soft wall of cloud right at your door... You can’t help but just stand there looking, letting the sight fill you with the miracle of magnificence just plain happening, in this day-to-day way.  

On the blue days, across that magic mirror glide the clouds that come sailing over the mountain like big baroque pearls, while hawks and swallows dive to snatch food from their reflections; at evening the calm of the mirror is broken into widening rings by a now-and-then rain, or rippled into memory by sudden evening breezes that shiver the silver light. 

From the morning train along the Lake, through Spring and Summer you can see the day-by-day changes all along the line, as the tides of days turn the land to sky that soon turns to rice leaves, the fields growing day by day into perfect levels of deep green blades that reveal the wind as they grow taller, until they begin to nod with the weight of their gold...

BAMBI MONOGATARI

You gotta love those rare special events you have no idea are coming, moments you couldn't have imagined would be waiting there just ahead of now, like the other night. I was driving the grandgirls (12, 10 and 10) up to our place to stay the weekend; the darkness lay heavy on the mountain and the fog was thick, the way it loves to get in Spring.

As we wended our way up the winding road toward the house, I was driving slowly, expecting who knows what, some wild pigs, a buck, maybe - even a bear - to dash out from the forest and across the road... Then, in that quiet mood, as we came up around the last curve to the crossroads, just past the tunnel, with not much visible in the lowbeam glare, we met the unexpected: standing there, all alone in the swirling mist, at the center of crossroads and headlights, stood the actual Bambi.

I must say, in the dense silence of a foggy mountain night there is nothing louder than the sudden spotlit appearance of a baby deer in the roadway with three little girls in the car. A high moment it was for the Trio, and a strange moment for that tiny creature out there, panic shivering its white-spotted golden fawn body, big dark eyes staring into blinding light, in a world as new as it ever gets...

The girls slowly hushed at the emotion of the sight; I slowed the car even more, not knowing which way a skittish Bambi might bolt as we crept slowly toward him standing there bouncing around on four brand-new gangly legs - boing, boing, boing - then bobbling away - But that way was uphill, houses up there; then heading left - fence there; then to the right - fence there too, what to do what to do, it would have to be downward then: into the jaws... of the glaring monster... Would there be such courage in that new life? Or might a skittish infant just bolt under the car? What do we evernew creatures know about such things?

I slowed... and then stopped; Bambi bounced his way toward the side of the road and teetered squeezily past us, within arm’s length out the open windows, the girls calling his name right into his big ears, until he could skitter for deer life into the welcome darkness. Bet he never forgets that time when the huge nightbeast came at him with blinding eyes and roaring voice, and how he managed his escape.

A tale of courage for all descendants.

SPRING SHIVER

Here it is, still cold, and near the end of April; never had woodfires at this time of year before; sometime in early March is when we began to get all our warmth directly from the sun again... I have to keep going outside to raid next year’s stack of split oak.

Even the intrepid early frogs are shivering, though not so many early ones this year; the rest are still biding their time. I can hear the eager ones at dusk and dawn from my bedroom, doing their best out there in the new cold mud and the dripping cedars, trying to get out the traditional chants in the usual vigorous way, but they can’t with such stiff diaphragms. A lot of jumpy quaverpeeping out there.

Frogs are cold-blooded of course, so can’t shiver in the mammalian way, but they’ve been around way longer than we have, and have evolved other ways to shiver in reaction to bizarre temperatures, and do their shiver equivalent. You can hear it in the songs they sing: not golden-oldie exaltations at the warm, invigorating burst of spring, but sad, jerky strings of woes and alases, barely making their way through the cold air without falling frozen to the ground...

As to the garden, the “spring” garden, even the Boston lettuce is hunched over, though the stolid iceberg looks at home; the spinach is all tentative green entities hunkered over on the ground, looking around for some sign of life in the cold wind; the lusty Mediterranean tromboncino, forget it, those seeds are dreaming of a coast somewhere south of Naples. Last year’s radicchio is turning purple, the zucchini needs a down vest...

Wonder what a winter in Sorrento costs these days...

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.

Spring wind 

wants every thing 

where it belongs

GRASSES OF THE FIELD

In this still evening the air is soft-- yesterday's cold, but with a new warm edge we can feel in our animal selves as the barely rain falls. The long wild grasses now draping the mountainside, grasses that wore the color of dying leaves back in autumn, and in winter - where they edged from the snow - were dead grey, this evening have a remarkable goldenness that reaches from within, a power they have always carried, that isn't life, exactly, but isn't death either - that says in the darkling hours that life is returning, that there is no edge to being: simply wait-- new life is here, has never left.

Even in what we deem death there are things to be done in ancient, hard-learned ways; thus the grasses glow in the early rain: they have evolved, seeded, grown, seeded again for this purpose too, among the countless others, and teach us of our own purposes, in lives we might view simplistically as regrettable aging toward regrettable cessation. For us, as for the grasses and all that lives, there is function everywhere along the line of life-- before, alive and beyond. As in the grasses of the field, the line is always reaching further than we can ever know at any once; in our way through life we are immeasurable, especially within.

Nodding gold in the faintest breeze, the blades go on glowing until all is dark, for now...

LISTEN RIGHT NOW

Today a fine sunny blue-skyed early Spring day up here on the mountain, me outside at last in late afternoon after wrestling to a draw with words up in the loft for the noonly hours...

Fine to be outside at last, full of ambition and tools in hand, here amidst the breath of trees beneath the calls of spiraling hawks to do some essential next year's firewood work. Just got started when I stopped at a sudden song from way up in the big oak tree, an intense and passionate riff with a special finish to it, repeated over and over with variations here and there and in the curlicue ending; it was a young early warbler, trying out a new Spring repertoire for all he was worth, adding what he felt to the old stuff.

He was bouncing around up there all alone like something of major importance was going on, as in fact it was. It clearly meant the world to him, and I got to share in that bit of joy. These early samplings of Spring swell the buds in us all, carry that ancient urgency right to our hearts from far before we ever were. His song carried all that too, made me stop my next year's work and listen right now to what's deeply going on.

SEEDS INTO THE WORLD

We had the traditional turning to Spring a few days ago, Echo doing the soybean-tossing ritual late at night; therefore we think of it as Spring already... So there I was, out in the late Spring afternoon today, thick curtains of snow in the way far north, that's yukiguni (snow country) up there, where it looks like it's still winter, but here it's perfect chill Spring weather for splitting firewood, and so I do. I have a new camphorwood splitting stump, which the landscaper down below left for me by the roadside. He left two of them. Perfect they are: sleek, heavy, fragrant, immune to decay...

The pauses are splendid too, I stop and rest the axe on the sawdusty ground, look up and see a blueing sky, the sun touching all with gold every now and then, and between me and the sky the lacework of the old chestnut tree, its limbs bare but for a few stubborn dun leaves and a last dozen or so spiky husks, now wide open as though shouting to the sky "I did it! I did it! I sent my seeds off into the world! To become big trees! I did it!" And right they are. Emptynesters know that feeling.

Working near the garden, thoughts of seeds naturally germinate into ambitions... Gonna try some tromboncino this year - heard the stems are too tough for the weevils to poke into... and some radicchio too (up here on the mountain? gotta try it!) and a zuke variety not so dependent on insect pollination, more like ad hoc immaculate conception; sounds interesting too. And some different kinds of basil in the new herb bed; more seeds waft on the mindwind...

The sky is getting bluer as I work, even as it gets colder, the split oak stacking up until the barrow is full, then it's wheeled over a ways and added to the cord-to-be, all those woody triangles a richening shade of pale gold, wooden ingots of wealth in the blue of the sky; then suddenly there are, all over the place - what must be - yes, they are: big fat flakes of snow, plopping straight down through the still air onto the split wood, the axes and me, the ground all around turning white, where in heaven did they all come from? It’s blue up there! Winter again!?

Not for the whole rest of the day, I hope.

BEANPOD CONVERSATIONS

Out in the garden this morning, pausing in my work to wipe the old brow and have a sip of water, I happened to be standing before the armspread profusion of the bean plants reaching, in all their white, pink and purple emotion, for what was out there. They were in love with the air, with being all there is to be, right now, just like we humans try to do in our better moments - reaching for the light - and I just had to hunker in their shade to admire.

As I did so, a green arm offered me a fresh beanpod so I took it, popped it into my mouth and we started talking together the old language of bean and tongue, a language we both know well, of nourishment and primal flavors, existential nuances that beans and bodies have worked out together over the eons that got us here, in great part on bean nourishment.

It was good, that little miracle right then, me and the bright plants hunkering there, sharing a delve into the deep history pertaining between that crisp green gift, stemmed from soil, rain and sun upon a seed, and this tongue, practiced middleman for the bean-body relationship.

It was rich in countless ways, our little get-together-- bean and tongue conversing in crunches and savorings of matters far older than either of us, bean becoming the man who plants the bean, when another kindly offered me a fresh beanpod, in which there were savors of the earth, and water, and growth - the past was there too, in summer mornings... and the hint of tomorrow...

So there we were for a time in the morning, ancient familiars, conversing once more on the Big Subject...

 

STRONG STUFF

Freewheeling down the winding road this morning into the rising sun of an enlightening day - the edgy kind, with an early bonechill but already intriguing aspects to it, even in the scent of the air - as I came to the open portion of the paddied slope just below the last curve through the forest and out into the open, I  could see ahead of me, below the Lake - as odd as that is to describe - the earliest farmer this year out readying his paddy for Spring tilling.

He alone of all the village rice farmers was out there at first light with his long-handled shovel, clearing the irrigation trenches, inlets and outlets all around his paddy, soon to be filled by the water that would gravitate down from the mountain by way of his neighbor's paddy above, and then from his own would flow down to fill that of his neighbor below. An important task to be done each year by each farmer, and so to be done well, to sustain this whole mountainside of good will.
 

He was working at the corner of the paddy above the road along which newbie I would pass on my motorcycle. Hearing then seeing me coming, he paused in his labors, leaned on his shovel with the sun at his back, we shouted good morning to each other and I passed on by, leaving him in the kind of deep, nature-fed silence you can only get out in the countryside, as opposed to city silence, the merely welcome absence of sound.

As I rolled on down the road, although  he turned again to his labors he remained imprinted on my retina in silhouette, burned there by the sun like an icon of some kind, which I suppose he is-- perhaps of responsibility that goes back 20 generations or more, has made it this far, and naturally plans to continue. 

 

Strong stuff.

 

 

BEING SEEDS

Last night after a cold but sunny day of casual work in the garden and firewood (chainsawed a big stash of cherry from the landscaper below) I was beginning to think we’d had our last frost and Spring is here, when I looked out the big front window before heading to bed last night and there was already a big white BAM! on the deck, and snow was falling heavily in fat flakes.

So Spring is NOT here yet, nyah, nyah, said each flake, my potseeded lettuces getting more anxious by the day, like the beginning bergamot, dill, thyme and Italian parsley, all bent in green eagerness from their little pots toward the window each morning to sense what they can about the weather and the temperature out there, is it time yet, is it time? Are we there yet? sussing out the day length and all that other stuff plants know so much about, wind strength, moon phase too probably, angle of sun etc., all that natural computing going on in their stolid green beings. And we think we have the brains.

So this morning down at the ice-covered train station, my thoughts wisping Springy things around in the background there, I gazed at the beauty of the sugarcake mountains powdered with white against the big blue morning sky, when up at the edge of my uplooking eye I saw something moving and looked further upward -- there, coursing along in the high blue were two broad wedges of geese heading north-- in silence, from down where I was, though way up there the air was likely filled with excited chatter at the big goings on.

I stood and watched them go for as long as I could see them, each wedge being 70-100 geese; the sight filled me with the feeling I've been waiting for, the rush I get each year when the unspoken promise is kept once more as nature declares the arrival of Spring, and it came to me what seeds we humans are.

Spring wind

wants every thing

where it's supposed to be

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...