The Melting World

It’s found! It’s found! Yes, it’s found! If you recall, a few months ago (uuuuhhh, I don’t know, back in the January entry titled “Lost hat”), I bemoaned the loss of a favored hat in poesy. Well, as I sat chatting to my husband on the cell phone from our car in the faculty parking […]

Warning: Do not proceed if you dislike scatological topics! While I was innocently doing my feeble attempt at yoga this early morning, my son rose up from the futon and waddled past me, only giving me a brief side-long look. I noticed he walked gingerly, with his legs wide apart, as if he had just […]

The line between life in the US and life in Japan blurs. I can’t remember if hot canned coffee is common in the States. I don’t think it is, at least I doubt it’s offered in vending machines, and it’s definitely not spat out of the machine piping hot like it is in Japan. Canned […]

Yesterday evening my family and I drove out, creeping our way instinctively through a blizzard, to the neighboring village of Higashikawa. We had been invited by a local NPO worker who said the townspeople wanted to speak with foreigners for advice about setting up a concierge system for incoming foriegn tourists who wished to hike […]

Remind me to never watch movies, especially violent ones, at night. Yesterday evening I went to the cinema to see “Bourne Supremacy” (alone) and I shared the experience with less than five other strangers. In Japan, since the English language is supplementary to the sound and the music, the volume is increased to the extreme, […]

Below the plane a silver plate begs for coins of constellations, enough to buy feed for the night mare to ride into the forest of glistening eyes and sharpened claws. With blind mutt’s eye, a lake searches its owner by scent and sound. There she is! Wrapped in riveted armor and hidden in ocean-rage boom. […]

Just ten minutes from our beach home, we saw the lusher greens of the north shore of Kaua’i, as the rain falls heaviest in the mountain rainforest in the distance. Below the mountains lie the taro fields.

On a dead-end road, we looked out over this majestic scene.

We just returned from a short stay in Kaua’i and now back among the snow tunnels and crisp blue skies of Hokkaido. The relentless roar of the ocean, the lush variation of tropical greens, the smell of citronella candles and the taste of fresh coconut meat linger inside me and I find it hard to […]