Snow!

So our first snow of the season fell yesterday morning. Our first slush fell the day before, but that doesn't count. There's not much of it out there, but it's still pretty.

It's also still falling (though it wasn't when I took that picture), so who knows how it will look later. I don't even know how it looks now. The windows are all fogged up.

Yup, snow.
We were told to expect the first snow sometime around mid-December to mid-January. We were also told that a high count of stinkbugs supposedly foretells a lot of snow for the following winter. We had a lot of stinkbugs. Do you remember those pictures of our pet spider? Well, all those lumps in her web were stinkbugs.

Speaking of our darling Nephila (yes, we named her), she's gone. She disappeared some time ago, leaving a lonely web behind. She may have been knocked down by the particularly strong winds we had the week she vanished and decided to rebuild where she landed...or she could have been eaten by a bird. Who knows. She's gone.

We sort-of miss her.

...

Sort-of.

Anyway, two days ago (the day of the first slush of the season), I woke up earlier than I normally do and headed to the grocery store without checking the clock. I knew when I had woken up, roughly, and realized partway there that the store was likely not open for another while. As I approached the store, I noticed that it was not blaring music and the lights didn't appear to be on, so I promptly took the next turn and began an adventure! Lucky for you, I took my camera along.

Okay, so it wasn't so much of an adventure as an "Alex walks up a hill along a road he's never been on before and back down it," but still, I have pictures.

We shall start with this: the closest Buddhist temple to our apartment (at least I think it's the closest). The picture isn't actually the temple itself (at least, not the main building). The structure directly behind the tall stone with writing carved into it is just the entrance gate. The buildings to the right appear to be part of the temple compound, but the main building is that rooftop to the right. It doesn't really look as impressive as this picture, though, so don't worry that I never took a picture of it. Do you see the pond on the right? It has a tree hanging over it, held up with crutches. I'm assuming that it is a flowering tree because it fits with the Japanese sense of aesthetics...that and it doesn't look like a maple. I'll have to check back in the spring.

I continued on the road and it was abruptly rural. This is not to say that we don't live in a rural town, but we live in the town part of the rural town and most of where I need to walk is also in the town part. So, it was quite startling to suddenly find I had wandered into the rural part. It was the walking into it that made it startling, not that it was there. We'd ride past several rural locations while being driven from one event to another, so I knew the rural was there...it just took some more active presence to make me realize it.

Oh, right! Pictures!

So I did a terrible job of taking pictures of the actual farms, but I got some interesting pictures, nonetheless. Here's the edge of a bamboo grove near a farm and the farm's shed. Did you know that bamboo is actually a species of grass? Amazing! Just imagine mowing that every week! But, yes. Those trees which don't appear to be able to support their own weight are bamboo.






Next up, persimmons!

I apologize that the subject of the picture is so dark. I blame the lighting and the poor angle. But "up" was the only angle available to me (it was a tall tree on a hillside), so here it is. The persimmon tree is standing next to a palm tree. It's hard to tell, but they're waving hello. There are still a bunch of persimmons on the tree. They are much smaller than the persimmons we normally get in the grocery store, but you can sometimes buy small persimmons too.

Now, let's get a look at this hillside.

You can't really see it in the picture, but there's a dirt path (with the occasional bit of wooden stairway) zig-zagging its way up the hill. Most of the trees are cedars of one variety or another. There are some evergreens of other sorts mixed in as well. The hillside was rather pretty, though, so I just wanted to make sure that you had a chance to see it too.

I continued climbing until I came upon a road at the hill's crest. Across the road was one of the elementary schools Nat teaches at (she's teaching there today). I decided to turn around at this point and I saw the bay (if you look, you can see the Amanohashidate). Turns out it wasn't much of a walk, and the rural bit I had encountered was only a tiny bit of winding, hillside road that Nat bikes up every Friday, but I still enjoyed it. Seeing the bay, though, made me decide that I wanted to walk by the sea. So, I meandered back down the hill. By the time I was nearing the road to the sea, a fine mist of snow pieces (there was no way anyone could really call it "snow") began to fall. As I approached, I noticed that the road to the sea had a police barricade. I decided that it was a bad time to visit the sea when a fire truck joined the police. So, I wandered through some back streets for a while, noticed a few stores I had never seen before and eventually made my way to the clock-on-a-signpost to check the time. The grocery store had just opened! I bought my groceries and went home. Later that day, the mist of snow pieces turned into a downpour of slush...which Nat had to bike home in. Poor Nat!

A hilltop cemetery behind the Buddhist temple.


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