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Just returned from some travels that were very lovely. Nagasaki, all in lights and gleaming 60 years after the atomic bomb, with bright thousands of paper cranes around the city, for peace. And Mt. Aso, an active volcano that is not red and bubbly with lava, but mint green and pale canary yellow, and very deep in the ground. Rachel and Anna and I stood near the smoke and sulfur and looked for faces in the rocks. Then off to Beppu, where we were buried in very hot sand baths, and ladies roughly wiped the sweat from our faces. And Shimonoseki, where I was born, and where many boats come and go, and where we got miserably lost on a very humid and very steep hill, and where we finally found the tiny wooden house where my parents and I lived, and where many mosquitoes ate us when we walked through small patches of bamboo forest. I love bamboo. But I did not love getting lost and everyone being in a foul mood. Then a quick stop in Nara to pet some sacred deer and admire a large bronze Buddha. And then, finally, we landed in Tateshina, a village in the Japanese Alps where my father spent many summers growing up. I hadn't been there for almost ten years, since my grandparents sold their rickety house soon after we found a dead mouse in the washing machine. This time we were in a brand new log cabin, built by my father's cousin, and we rode bicycles and painted plates with a very nice old couple who had been making pottery for 50 years. This was their last year, and the man showed us pictures from his exhibition in Poland, and gave us lots of food: mountain potatoes cooked in their homemade pottery kiln, sweet pickled plums, marinated white zucchini. I liked watching my father talk to the people in the village that he had known, who remembered him as a little boy, and now he is 56 and they seemed proud of him. And we were all kind of nostalgic, because people are growing older. And we hiked to the old house, which is still standing but very abandoned, and we met an 81 year-old man who was my grandfather's student, and is now a Max Weber scholar who also writes opera critiques and books about landscaping. He was saucy and I liked him but felt shy because my Japanese is not good (and I hate that it is not good). We went hiking through a forest I had never seen, where the trees curled and looped around large rocks in extraordinary shapes, and we wandered around saying things like, “This one looks like a mermaid that is singing.” There was a waterfall at the end, and it was a rather perfect ending. My mother picked up rocks along the way to put in our garden at home, and we all understood why.

Then my grandmother came home from the hospital to stay with us for a couple of days, and I was excited but nervous because she does not always remember us. She was born in 1914. How amazing it would be to live that long. And now she is gone again, and my mom and sisters are gone, and it is very quiet here except for the swish-swish of the dishwasher.