Bountiful sun and rain has sent the flora into overdrive. Grain Full is the name of this season when all things flourish, including the weeds that turn my tidy hillside into a jungle. It’s all I can do to keep everything just under control. But like a diamond in the rough, plump, dense, fruity, and […]

We can feel a shift out of spring and into early summer. In t-shirts and bare feet, with our lunches out on a sunny deck, we utter words not spoken for so many months, it’s hot! The cat takes refuge in the garden, a shady patch of grass cooler than the baking wooden planks.  There […]

The hillsides are a melange of every shade of green. Purple wisteria drapes from the canopy, a pastel shawl thrown around verdant shoulders. I’m just home from 10 days on the road. While I revel in tracking the minute shifts from micro-season to micro-season, a stretch of time away reveals the speed with which the […]

Years ago I stumbled upon a box of embroidered orbs in Kuniko’s attic. They were temari, I was told, vintage playthings from a time before children had rubber balls to bounce and leather balls to bat. I found them so intriguing that I did what I always do when fascinated by a new object or […]

“Making good dashi is the first secret of the simple art of Japanese cooking.” Shizuo Tsuji Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art As the sun rises I wake, make a cup of coffee, and prepare to draw the day’s dashi. I place a large square of konbu, dried giant kelp, in fresh water and let it […]

Mid-afternoon I drove down the mountain, my mind turned in on itself, fully absorbed in anticipation of the meeting I was rushing towards. I came around the familiar bend at the end of the bamboo grove and drove straight into the blustering burn. It delivered me from my distraction right into the moment, what might […]

This morning I woke to the gentle patter of a steady rainfall. The sun struggled to impel its light through a sky quilted in dark clouds. The air is slowly but steadily warming and what once fell as snow now turns to rain. It saturates the earth. As the thawing soil drinks it in, moisture […]

Outside my kitchen window a party of small, cold-hardy songbirds splash about in a flooded pot of dormant water lilies. Their giddy chatter and cheerful presence never fails to brighten my day. But today is already a bright day. The sun beams from a clear sky as if to celebrate this first day of a […]

The season of Daikan (greater cold) lived up to its name this year unlike any other. It was the coldest stretch on record in my time in Mirukashi. Last week temperatures were below zero nightly and rarely peaked above 2 or 3 degrees during the day. Flurries of snow were constant though not accumulative. I’m […]

East meets west in an orange tree When I arrived in Mirukashi, untethered by words or customs to the culture, I plunged my hands into the earth in an effort to ground myself. I tried to tame the wild mountainside and to garden in the hard, red clay to little avail and so instead turned […]