Impermanent Resident

Twenty three years ago, when I first started visiting the little village I’m living in now, there was no elevated highway upon which you could cruise at 80 km/hr over the rice fields, gliding from one rural town to another. It was all narrow back roads at 40-50 km/hr, keeping an eye out for farm equipment and animals (which I still prefer over the highway).

At the time the highway was being constructed my wife was working for the prefectural office that was handling payments to rice farmers who had to give up portions of their land to make way for the project. According to my wife, they were very well compensated. In addition to the payments, the government built passageways under the highway so that the small roads going between the rice fields remained unobstructed (in the photo above you can see one of those passageways in the distance).

I’m glad the farmers were well compensated. Even with government subsidies, it’s not an easy life.

Typhoons, floods, droughts, ravenous wildlife and insects, fluctuations in commodity prices and exchange rates, expensive machinery breaking down, kids moving to the city and leaving no one to help out…

Nonetheless, people have been growing rice around here for generations. At this time of year about half of the fields are already harvested, and the other half have turned amber, and are waiting.

I’m in charge of weeding our yard. I tackle the job whenever I remember I’m supposed to do it, which isn’t frequently enough, because the weeds get ahead of me, growing faster than I can uproot them. There was one section of our yard I just never got to, and the weeds there grew tall, and I felt bad about it every time I looked at them. Then one morning last week I glanced at the dreaded spot and was surprised and delighted to discover that beautiful white flowers had bloomed at the tops of the tallest stalks, apparently overnight. I felt a rush of gratitude and relief for having been a slacker at weeding. Since then, I notice that most of the flowers I see are “weeds” — wild plants that have somehow been spared contact with the likes of me, blooming without regard for anyone. I’m finding it much harder to remember to do the weeding.

I returned from Takamatsu yesterday. It was a good visit, even though the purpose was to attend a two-day funeral. The morning before the second day of the funeral I walked the streets and took some photos. The human impulse to decorate was on full display.

It showed up everywhere, from ceilings to sidewalk tiles to back alleys.

At some point in my stroll I began to see decorative elements in places and things that were not intended to be decorative (at least I don’t think they were).

Perhaps that’s one of the functions of decoration: to stimulate an imaginative process that extends beyond a single object in one place and time, reminding us that anything can be more than what it is.