monohanako

Bean and her Brethren

Driving home today I made the final turn onto our road. Not 50 feet from our driveway, I glanced to my left and saw 5 kittens in a tree.

Taking it Outside

To be close to the amenities of a house and out in the elements is what I consider the perfect living arrangement. Too many people live closed up in artificial environments. We get excited if the weekend affords us time for outdoor activities. Experiencing life outside our homes and offices has become an effort, something we do, an event. So, when designing my perfect home, I have always imagined an outdoor living space. In an urban area, it would be a rooftop oasis where well-placed foliage and a deck chair would accommodate sunny afternoons spent reading. In the desert it would be a house of glass with a view continuous from inside and out. In the New England countryside it would be a renovated barn with the barn doors on either end thrown open to invite inside and outside air to mingle. In Southern California, a ring of rooms would surround a courtyard and movement from one space to the next would require a jaunt down an exposed corridor. And though more modest than a rooftop terrace or barn doors, this dream has been finally realized.

Turning up the Volume

Summer is getting louder. Temperate mornings awake with the trill of songbirds and the doves’ quiet coos, punctuated by the crows’ loud complaints. Each day it seems a new instrument is added to the orchestra.

While gardening a couple of weeks back, I noticed the obvious silence. As my skin relaxed into the long missed warmth of the sun, I noted the still air. The world was quiet except for the occasional bee flying by. I reveled in the calm before the storm and wondered when I would hear the first one of those trumpets that blast all summer long. For those who are unaccustomed to the noise that is summer cicadas, it is racket like no other. They are Iggy Pop to the Vivaldi of Vermont’s summer crickets and they make you want to shout, like a mother to her teenage son, “TURN IT DOWN!” But shouting at cicadas would only serve to confirm that you are as crazy as you have come to feel. Their dramatic crescendos grate like background music that is just a little too loud and it almost seems you have to shout to be heard over the din. Their constant clamor agitates, disturbing the full enjoyment of lazy summer afternoons.

A few days ago, while hanging the laundry out to dry I heard the all too familiar sound coming from the trees behind the house. The first cicadas of the season were making their tumultuous entrance into the waking world after years of slumber below. Their numbers have been slowly growing each day. The show has begun and now it is only a matter of time until I start praying for a moment of silence.

Eating from the Earth

Donning rubber boots and gathering supplies, buckets, rubber gloves, a hoe, and the dog, we prepare to gather April’s bounty.

Stilling the Mind

If patience is a virtue than I am an un-virtuous woman. I’m generally in the red when it comes to patience. I don’t know why. But, regardless of the cause, I know the symptoms well and they make me, at times, an unbearable person to be around. My impatience tests the patience of those around me. And though I lack patience for tolerating many of the things around me, perhaps first and foremost, I lack patience for myself. I am always thinking of things to come. The future constantly occupies my thoughts. I rarely give consideration or value to the present moment, and generally live in the potential of the future. My goals always far exceed my accomplishments and the only way to escape the frustration of constantly failing myself is to look forward to a long list of new goals that I can strive towards achieving.

A Reason To Love My Country

A recent trip to revisit the American Southwest gave me a reason to love my country at a time when I sorely needed it. When I moved to Japan, I intended to leave the States for only a year. But as time passes, I find myself with fewer and fewer reasons or desires to return. In the last few years, I’ve felt the ugliness of my nation and shame about being one of a group of people who consistently bully our way into blind comfort. I believe that the United States is full of good, kind, and tolerant if not always progressive people. I have always found communities of such people to live among. But we are not the face of our nation and it has been hard to look into the mirror of the world and see the face that it looking back.

The Things We Miss

I was born wanting more than I can have. It has been in my nature, from the time I can remember, to set seemingly impossible goals and then navigate the toughest route towards them. Recently, it was my desire to observe every passing day and experience every seasonal event here in Japan this year, but my travel schedule already has me out of the country nearly three months. How to experience a full year in only three quarters of it…? So I am learning to appreciate the things I miss, to give the things I don’t experience equal weight to the things I do.

Death's Heavenly Hues

Death is a lovely color. Gazing across the way, the subdued green hillside of cedar and black pines are punctuated by amber clusters. These trees have succumbed to disease and though they still stand, their sap no longer flows. The needles’ green has faded leaving a bleached shell. But the color is marvelous.

Waking

Last night we heard spring’s battle cry. Our home sits high on a hill, the front lines of combat when spring wages war around this time every year. The ground trembles as spring storms forth, tearing at the sky to gauge the flesh of winter.

Shaping a Place Between

High on a hill outside the town of Karatsu, in the Saga prefecture of Kyushu Japan, two adjacent driveways leave a thinly populated narrow winding road and veer away from each other. They pass two sides of a 54-foot long rectangular building sheathed in corrugated steel siding. At 9:00 pm on an April night, the sound of a steady spring rain falling outside mixes with the soothingly haunting melody of Bach’s cello suites playing inside. It is comfortably cool. This is the kind season, a season of tempered weather between the cold dampness of winter and the oppressive humid heat of summer. Inside, Hanako Nakazato, a 34-year old potter, sits near her wheel attending to a board full of half dry cups. She is 5’3 with broad shoulders. Her oak colored skin stretches over wide cheekbones and her thin lips rest in a slight frown. Her seat faces a row of picture windows. The glass divides her well-lit throwing room from the thick darkness of the rainy night. The windows reflect her surroundings back at her. The room is all wood rising from a cement floor. The walls are paneled in cedar and large wooden beams support the high roof. The building is exquisitely crafted, an honest structure made of honest materials. It is handsome in its simplicity and quietly boasts the skills of its makers.