Only a Blockhead saw its first post on June 17, 2007—back when blogging was a thing; nine months after Facebook opened to everyone—and has been sporadically reporting in words and pictures ever since. My co-Blockheads NC Tate and David will mark the anniversary in their own way. At the outset, a friend (and former Blockhead) said that if I kept writing, it could eventually amount to a book. He was being encouraging, but the words have indeed piled up, so I plan to go back through 10 years of posts and follow the year with a digest of some of them.
Early June, and the rice fields on the valley floor are being filled with water prior to the planting. Cultivated earth slowly cedes to liquid. The expanses of water bring an odd feeling of security.
(夕暮れの水田 Akiyoshi’s Room via Wikimedia Commons)
In the flooding paddies
Darkness raises
A magnificent cacophony of frogs.
(2013)
The annual rainy season is declared in the first week or two of June. How much rain it brings varies by the year.
It was a week of pouring rain and bright sunshine by turn. Blowzy hydrangeas are the flowers of the moment, blooming blue, white and pink in gardens and hedgerows. Most of the paddies are planted with rice shoots that poke above the glassy surface; green bristles as sparse as a baby's hair.
On the way home this evening, a clutch of white butterflies spun out of the undergrowth, whirled around me and flew away.
After sunset the half moon shines down from high in the sky, and the massed choir of frogs croaks in the darkness.
(2008)
The rainy season
In the morning downpour
Swallows swoop through raindrops
The rainy season
First pale hydrangeas are hardly pink; hardly blue
The rainy season
Laundry limp on the carousel, drying indoors
The rainy season
Rice shoots grow, and paddies slowly turn from glass to grass
The rainy season
Yellow strings of chestnut blossom
Smelling like sex
(2011)
--Julian
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