Moving Along

I am having some security issues with this location so we are moving over to Wordpress. It is a move I have been planning for a while but now just seems like the right time.
Come find us here.

Hope you are all well.
xo

Keiho-ed

Just to note, in case the news of my part of the world has reached your part of the world, we have had too much of the plum rain and now we are melting. Luckily, my family lives on the second floor of a solid apartment building not very near rivers or mountains. Unfortunately, most people in our area do. We are under evacuation orders or a command to move to the second floor because of flooding. Sirens have been wailing all night. The emergency alarms on the phone keep going off every twenty minutes or so, telling us of landslide dangers, overflowing rivers, telling us to stay indoors, to stay up and out of the way.
The weather warning map is completely purple, like a nasty bruise. It is very serious but we are okay, I want to assure you of that. We are okay.

Plum Rain

Yesterday it was like standing in a Turkish bath. The typhoon turned away and did not bother to gather up the clouds that had been preparing for its arrival. School had been cancelled and all the kids were roaming the streets under cloudy skies.

Today it is like we are drowning in that bath. June was a disappointing rainy season; all the hydrangeas bloomed and withered in the dry days, the snails were nowhere to be seen. July is trying to make up for June's drought.
Hiroshima is not fond of the rain. It is either low and cut through with rivers or mountainous and cut through with rivers. Not to mention that the baseball stadium has no roof so that means no Carp games. 

The students were sent home again today because we are under a heavy rain warning. 警報（keiho); an alarm, a warning. It is the keyword of the week. If it does not stop raining over night, the warning will not lift and I will have work but no students.

So I am now at work, desk-bound and having caught up on my planning, I feel like I need to break my silence here but I am having a hard time doing so. There is something very addictive about silence. I like it so much that I have deactivated most social media sites or just deleted the apps from my non-phone phone. I also stopped reading the news or talking about the news. I listen to podcasts instead, read about linguistic anthropology, and study Japanese. I have not written a story in months. Even poems are excessive right now. It is a period of gestation. My cocoon is soft but thick. Only the very determined can penetrate it.

I am not remorseful but I do feel like I must show some sign of life, lest you worry, lest you think I am something other than a busy mother trying to survive. You do not need to worry but what you think is up to you.

The clock releases me and thus I will leave this somewhat random post here for you to read. I will be walking home in the rain, soaked sneakers and my mind full of grammar patterns and kanji readings.

I hope you all are well. 

Perhaps I will return tomorrow, if the rain does not let up. 

Goodbye Golden Week.

It's the end of Golden Week, the late Spring bank of national holidays that we are lucky to get here in Japan. It is rainy and cold outside but inside we are baking cookies and finishing up homework. It has been a good holiday week, low-key but enjoyable.

We went to nearby Miyajima twice (seven tram stops away): once in the evening when the shops were shuttered and we saw the main hall of a Buddhist temple packed with a silent audience watching a priest retell a parable in song; again yesterday for kodomonohi (children's day) but to the other side of the island where it is crowded with trees and deer and we feel decidedly more at home.

I also managed to make tracks on my new project and clean my bedroom, banishing the cardboard boxes that had been lining the walls since the move.

It has been the first proper time off since starting this new job. I was on probation for the initial six months and was not privileged to have any paid leave during that time. Most weeks I work Monday through Saturday. This means that I have not had much time to really think about what I am doing, where I am headed. In some ways, this has been nice as it has meant just following a routine, sinking into the moment rather than overthinking things like usual. 

And yet this Golden Week has given me the time I really needed to reflect and consider. And what I realised, well, that will have to be saved for another post. 

Hope you all are well. 

Take care.