Happy New Year!
This year I will celebrate my 77th birthday. (I am getting needlessly old again.) In the past, I used to think that at 77, I was a very old man and had a certain air of dignity about me. Now that I have become one, I see that I am indeed a poor old man in appearance, but my head has not changed much from when I was a child and has not evolved much.
Even when it snows, dealing with the trees and bamboos and maintaining the fields is just like playing outside when I was a child, and I lose track of time. I must be getting closer and closer to being a child. And maybe I am preparing to return to nature?
Year of the Snake -> Snake Memories
This year is the year of the snake, but I did not see any snakes at Kawamata Farm the year before last and the year before last. Until then, we used to see snakes almost every day in the summer. I wonder if it was the summer heat or some change in the environment.
Ever since I was a child, I have had a very close relationship with snakes. Every day during summer vacation, I would go swimming in the Shinano River, and on the way I would catch a striped snake, skin it, and leave it to dry in the sun. On the way back home after a long swim, I would roast the half-cooked snakes over a fire and eat them. It was a very tasty memory.
(Then again, my life seems to have encountered a period of great change with the blossoming of AI as an old man, eating snakes like the Jomon people when he was a child)
These are the shells of the Lord that were under the floor of my house. There were so many of them that I could have encountered them as soon as I walked around for a bit, but where did they all go?
New Year’s feast
The old woman makes a large quantity of sea cucumbers, Matsumae pickles, and black soybeans for her grandchildren for the New Year’s feast for three households.This year we were able to obtain fat sea cucumbers, so they were especially tasty. We also had yellowtail sashimi, noppe, kombu maki, namasu, and grilled salmon.
Vinegared sea cucumber, Matsumae pickles, and black soybeans for one house.
(Socrates was a great man, but so was the first guy to eat a sea cucumber!)
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