Asakiyume mita

Asa-no-ha moyō

My third kid, Little Springtime, was born in Japan. Friends there gave us baby clothes for her that had this pattern on it. We were told that traditionally, this was a protective pattern that will keep babies safe.



I thought I'd like to make a quilt with this pattern for my arriving-in-April grandchild, so I wanted to find it online so I'd be sure to get it right. But I didn't know the name for the pattern. Imagine my amusement when I found out it's 麻の葉文様, asa-no-ha moyō. "Moyō" means "pattern"; "ha" means "leaf"; and asa (麻; also read "ma") means .... drumroll please... cannabis! (but also hemp or flax; all these things are related). In fact 麻 is the first character in the compound 麻薬, mayaku, which means "narcotic."

Japan is very strict with regard to drugs. It's something universities here have to counsel students who are going over on an exchange year about: certain ADHD medications are prohibited--Adderall, for example--and certain things that are over-the-counter medications in the United States are also prohibited (e.g., Nyquil). And let's not even talk about cannabis possession.

But in olden times, people knew another truth ;-)

A father's face

My dad frequently buys ham at the deli in his local Hannafords, so he's a familiar face there. One middle-aged woman behind the counter is always friendly to him. Yesterday, when he was there, she said,

"Do you know why I like you so much?"

"Is it that we know each other from somewhere else?" he asked.

"No--it's that you remind me of my father." She gestured to her chin to indicate my dad's beard. It turned out her father passed away two years ago. She and my dad got to talking more. "You've inherited his friendly ways," my dad said to her. It turns out she's from Iraq.

Sometimes people are angels in our lives, and I feel like he was one for her and she was one for him.

It's a choose-your-own post ;-)

( made-up story )

( true story )

Sometimes on Wednesday nights, I join an online writing session--you know the type of thing: everyone introduces themselves, then settles down for X amount of time for writing, then comes back together to chat about it. Usually, along with the introductions, there's some kind of icebreaker question...

( CW! You are about to enter the realm of petty, competitive thoughts and resentments! )

So there you go folks! Unvarnished Asakiyume!

I've been visiting my father, usually on Sundays, during the summer, but this weekend, knowing that Henri was coming, I went on Saturday. When the hurricane came up, he reminisced about the famous (in these parts, anyway) Hurricane of 1938, which he could remember.

My dad was a little boy of seven at the time, living in Lexington, MA. He said that at that time, no one in the region had any experience with hurricanes. His uncle Sal (whom I believe I've mentioned on these pages before: he was part of the team that captured top-recorded** world wind speed in 1934 from atop Mt. Washington) told the family, "A big wind is coming."

He said there were pine trees by the house, and one just snapped, halfway up its trunk, and the top went sailing by the house. Everyone in the family was huddled on the second floor of the house when there was a loud noise from the attic. The negative pressure had caused a skylight in the attic to blow open, and a huge gust of leaves came rushing in and whirling through the house.

He said his father said, "I need a rope; where's a rope?"--he wanted to go tie the skylight closed.

Well, my father's little brother--my uncle--was clutching a brown paper bag full of his precious possessions (my dad mentioned a teddy bear whose head had fallen off), and among those possessions? A length of rope!

"I have rope," my uncle said.

So my grandfather used that rope to batten down the skylight--my three-year-old uncle saved the day!

As for Hurricane Henri, right now it's bringing us the intense but very fine rain that hurricanes do. By the way, do people know the site windy.com? It's fun for looking at storms and wind patterns. (Here's Henri.) You can move the little marker on the far right further up to get the wind speeds higher in the atmosphere (they get faster; it's very pretty).


**The record was broken, as the link says, in 1996 by a wind recorded by an unmanned instrument station on Barrow Island, Australia during Tropical Cyclone Olivia.

So, three days ago I made up a little story while I was mowing the lawn, the story in the previous entry.

As you'll recall if you caught that entry, it involved a cloisonné dagger.

So, I was more than a little freaked out when THIS arrived at the house just now.



...Admittedly, not for me but for Wakanomori, BUT STILL.

Of all the thank-you tchotchkes and souvenirs you could send from Korea ...

...It required a signature. The tiny young woman who delivered it was wearing silver bangles with bells around her ankles, and she commented on the fragrance at the front of the house, where we've let a lilac bush expand into all available space.

At 6:30, this windstorm knocked out the power, and I freaked out, picturing us without power for days in the well-below-freezing temperatures. The pipes would surely freeze and burst and then cost extravagant amounts to fix, and anyway we wouldn't be able to fix them right away because everyone else's pipes would have burst too, and so the helper-fixer people would be in short supply.

I went to the supermarket to get milk and maybe another candle. In the parking lot, I met Wakanomori, who'd just gotten off the bus; he said the town to the west had power. I knew from the gossip in the supermarket that the town to the east didn't.

"We'll just have to sleep in one huge bundle in the living room under coats and blankets to keep warm," I said as we drove home. Without street lights or house lights, it was deeply dark everywhere.

As we were about to turn in at our driveway, our headlights illuminated a huge and unearthly creature, the color of smoke and about as corporeal, standing where we usually park. It was a deer--standing in the middle of the driveway. It stared at us a moment, then ceded us the parking space and walked away down the slope into our neighbor's backyard accompanied by a friend who'd been standing by our apple tree.

"National Grid estimates the power will be back by 11 pm," the healing angel reported, once we were inside.

"Please let it be so," I prayed.

And a minute later, the lights came on.

I think it was a blessing from the deer.

In the supermarket the other day, a mom scolded her baby, who was sitting in the little seat at the front of the shopping cart, when the baby leaned down and started chewing on the cart handle. "Don't do that! You don't know where that's been!" the mom exclaimed.

AND HOW RIGHT SHE IS! Just **think** of the adventures shopping carts get up to!

The cart you are sitting in right now, baby, may recently have been sunning itself on the beach...


(source)

Or it may have been tangling with rival gangs in shadowed alleys... (though your shopping cart seemed more hale and hearty than this one)



(source)

It may have been for a refreshing swim...



(source, an old LJ friend's journal)

Or perhaps spent time communing with the mountains...



(click through for source, Flickr user "Malcolm").

Baby, if we were to give you a blessing, it might be to travel as widely as a shopping cart.

For reasons that would make a good story, which I will tell any of you if I see you in person, but which I won't go into here, we made a journey to Canada yesterday.

That is a long trip for a day trip, may I just say, but anyway. We encountered some interesting people along the way.

The Leaf Lady

She was from England. We encountered her at a a rest stop and information center on the interstate in Vermont. She was here, apparently, for the foliage, which is looking pretty magnificent in northern Vermont right now, but my phone got itself in a tizzy trying to update operating systems, so NO PHOTOS.

Leaf Lady: Excuse me, where are the leaves?

Visitor Center Staff Person: There's a board out front that tracks the foliage. It's best in the Northeast Kingdom right now.

Leaf Lady: All right. How far is it to Kingdom?

VCSP: You're entering it now.

Leaf Lady: And so I'll see leaves?

VCSP: Well, it's overcast today, so it may not seem as impressive, but yes.

Us, mentally: THERE ARE BEAUTIFUL LEAVES LITERALLY ALL AROUND YOU.

We made up a story that one of her children, who likes mountain biking and free running and recaning old chairs and making cheese, came to the United States and married a Vermonter and wanted her to see this beautiful place, but the mom is very suburban and didn't really want to come and this is her passive-aggressive resistance.

That center had a school parent-teacher group raising money by offering fresh coffee and baked goods fro a donation. Excellent.

The anti-tourism border guard

We crossed into Canada at a very small crossing point. There were no other cars on the road, and only one border guard, a young woman in her twenties.

Border Guard: And what is the purpose of your trip to Canada today?

Thanks to Wakanomori's research, we had a good answer to this question.

Wakanomori: We're going to see the museum in Coaticook.

Or was it a good answer

Border Guard (incredulous): No one goes to see the museum in Coaticook!

Wakanomori (laughing): Uh, well, we are.

Me (piping up from the passenger's seat): It's a holiday in the United States.

Border Guard: It is here, too: Thanksgiving.

Me: Hmmm. I wonder if the museum will be open, then...

Border Guard: And where are you from again? Massachusetts? And you're coming up just to see the museum?

Wakanomori: It's a long story.

Border Guard: I have all day!

Wakanomori then told her the story of how he and the older kids had biked this route to Canada years ago, and how he'd noticed about the museum then, and....

Border Guard: I see--so you're retracing your steps! Well, enjoy yourself. Maybe you can get some honey or cheese!

Interestingly, we saw a place selling honey a little further along the road--so we could have!

The gas station attendants

These were boys who looked to me like maaaaybe they were 14 or so, but I guess they must have been older? They were full of life and smiles, and they were going to pump our gas! It wasn't a self-serve station. Going to Colombia has emboldened me in languages that I'm not fluent in, so I tried out my rusty, rusty French: "Avez vous une salle de bain?" And he answered me in French and pointed out where the bathroom was! 通じた！(This handy word means literally, it passed through and more accurately, I made myself understood. THE BEST FEELING)

The man at the museum
The museum had a definite shut vibe to it, though there were other people walking the grounds when we got there. We rang the doorbell, as requested by the sign. After a bit a man appeared and told us, politely and with a smile but at length, that he was desolé and that it was un dommage, but the museum was closed. We nodded and thanked him but he kept apologizing, and in that moment all I could think of for "we understand" was 分かりました and entendemos.

The fox spirit
On the grounds of the museum, the healing angel spied a fox. It ran under the museum porch, but then came out again and ran up some stone steps leading up a hill behind the museum. It was very tall for a fox, with long, graceful legs. It stood on the steps halfway up the hill and regarded us, very foxy. Then it ran the out of sight. It was a prince among foxes, a god, a spirit.

Annnd then we came on home, long drive back. Hope you all had a wonderful Indigenous People's Day/Thanksgiving/Monday.

I still haven't managed to do any more Inktober sketches, in spite of some excellent prompts, but here's a doodle of a young woman who was in the waiting room at the mechanic's where I went to get my car inspected.

She was perched on one of those molded-plastic chairs that have depressions for your bottom and your back. She had her legs drawn up to her chest and was concentrated fixedly on her phone. She was pretty, but nervous seeming, someone I'd expect to express themselves in waves of rapid speech.

She was having a Prius fixed. Unrelated to whatever its troubles were, it was missing its rear hubcaps. Before it had been missing one, but now it was missing both. "Oh well--now it's symmetrical," the woman said.

One of the mechanics chatted with her as she was paying, from which he (and I) learned that she'd moved to this area from California, which she'd left because of the--what do you guess? Guess anything! I was thinking she'd say wildfires. (Answer is below the picture.)



She said traffic. Which I know is bad, based on what friends have told me. But so bad that you move state? And not just to a different state, but 3,000 miles away? There's more to this story than meets the eye. Or ear. It's none of my business, but I do wonder.

I saw a pickup truck pulled up on the opposite side of the road from me as I was driving to do the recycling. As I neared the spot, I saw a catbird just sitting in the road ahead of me, not moving. The burly guy in the pickup truck said, "There's a bird in the road."

I stopped. The guy's lanky companion, who was outside the truck, approached the catbird with a jacket in his hands, to pick it up gently and without touching it. Just as he was about to, the bird fluttered off the road and into the long grass and dandelions. "He tricked me!" said the lanky guy. The guy in the truck shrugged his shoulders and laughed.

I drove on, really happy that those two guys--going in the opposite direction--were willing to stop and help out a catbird in need, even if in the end the catbird declined the offer. IRL goodness.