Every year as I watch the trees turn and my annual bout of autumn nostalgia kicks in, I find myself yearning for Japan. It’s funny that while I was serving my mission there, I was homesick most of the time. After returning to the United States, it took a while for any sort of nostalgic sentiment for Japan to develop. Don’t misunderstand me, I loved Japan while I was there. I loved the food and the people and the food and so many things about their culture and history and the food. But I had some difficult times as a missionary, mostly with having to deal with other missionaries from the United States. But after several years’ distance, the hard memories faded and the good memories took on the golden glow of nostalgia. Japan is a beautiful place and its two most beautiful seasons are spring, when the cherry trees bloom, and fall when the maple trees turn. I served in the Kansai region, the area that includes Osaka, Kyoto, and Kobe. Although I spent most of my mission in and around the huge city of Osaka, I was able to visit other areas in the mission. I especially loved the city of Kyoto, the ancient capital and cultural heart of Japan. In the Kyoto area there are places famous for their fall leaves. People travel from all over Japan, even from all over the world, to visit those places. The Japanese have a tradition called momijigari (autumn leaf hunting) where they travel to areas famous for fall color. In the fall of 1978, I got to go on a momijigari to one of the most famous fall leaf pilgrimage sites in Japan, the village of Takao.
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Missionary me in 1978.
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Autumn in Japan.
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Takao is about an hour’s bus ride north of Kyoto. I went there with my companion, Elder Pew, and our Japanese friend Tomi-San. We walked through the maples on winding paths and over bridges that spanned the gorge there, marveling at the beautiful trees. We ate lunch at a little inn on a balcony overlooking the gorge and I had one of my favorite dishes, katsu donburi, a fried pork cutlet served with egg and vegetables over rice. We ate one of the seasonal specialties of the inn, maple leaf tempura, which I thought tasted mostly of the sweet, crisp tempura batter. I remember Takao as a beautiful, serene place. I’d like to visit there again some day.
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Takao, 1978.
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Takao, 1978.
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The inn where we ate lunch.
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The gorge at Takao.
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Maple leaf tempura.
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There are over a thousand varieties of Japanese maples. They are lovely trees. They don’t grow to enormous size like the sugar maples in my yard here. They are smaller, more delicate looking trees. They are renowned for their various leaf shapes and their intense fall colors. I’ve always wanted to plant some here, but they are not hardy in my Zone 4 garden. I’m still replanting my woodland garden and I’m tempted to plant one next spring and take my chances.
About ten years ago, I don’t remember the exact year, I planted some acorns out in my little meadow. They sprouted and grew and are turning into very pretty trees. They are red oaks (Quercus rubra) and right now they are very red in their autumn splendor.
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Little oak trees in my meadow.
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One of my red oaks.
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| My red oak close up. |
Early on Wednesday morning, before the sky began to lighten, I went out into the dark. The sky was crystal clear and the stars were brilliant. The Milky Way was like a luminous powdery cloud flowing across the sky. Orion and the Pleiades were shining overhead. We live far from any big city and have very little light pollution here. Potter County is famous for its dark skies. The reason I went out so early was to see Mars. It has been on its closest pass to Earth for the past few weeks and we have been watching it. It was at its closest on the 6th, a mere 38.57 million miles away, but our sky was cloudy that night and morning and we did not see it. Now it is moving away from us again, but it is still very bright. It will not pass this close again for another fifteen years. So I went out to see it. And there it was, glowing over the western horizon red and beautiful. But when I turned to the east, I saw an even more beautiful sight – a thin crescent moon shining with earth light and above it, Venus blazing. As I stood and stared in awe, this passage from Psalm 8 came to my mind:
When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers,
the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;
What is man, that thou art mindful of him?
and the son of man, that thou visitest him?
For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels,
and hast crowned him with glory and honour.
As the nights grow colder, when the sky is clear, stargazing is at its best. Unfortunately, it is hard to stand out in the cold for any length of time to enjoy them.
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The crescent moon and Venus (not my photo).
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For the first time in a long time, an icon appeared on my weather page that sent a shiver down my spine. Snow. I knew it wouldn’t amount to anything, and it didn’t. The daytime temperatures are still too warm for that, but even so, it made me cringe. I’m not ready for it. My garden might be ready, it’s all tidied up and ready for bed. We might have firewood prepared and the furnace lit. I might have plenty of warm clothes, coats, gloves, and fleece-lined apparel to wear, but I’m mentally not ready to face winter weather. Autumn is just too short.
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The unwelcome icon.
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I continue to take my morning walks most mornings, but it’s colder now and I must wear a coat when I go out. I like to be out when the sun comes up over the hill. There is still some color in the trees and when the first full sunlight hits them, it is thrilling.
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Scenes from my morning walks.
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| Scenes from my morning walks. |
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| Scenes from my morning walks. |
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| Scenes from my morning walks. |
Yesterday when I went out in the morning it was 17°. The world was white with frost, but not snow. The sun hadn’t come up over the hill yet, but I went out anyway and filled the bird feeders and then took a walk down to the beaver pond. There was a light fog hanging over the water. There were ducks on the pond that flew away as soon as they saw me approach. There was a kingfisher and a heron there that stayed. I walked along the road and then crossed it and went up the bank toward home again. As I was walking up the bank, I noticed whiter, heavier patches of frost on the grass. When I went to investigate, I found holes in the ground about three inches across by each frost patch. I believe some small warm-blooded animal was down each hole and the heavier frost was the moisture from their breath freezing on the grass. I have no idea what creatures were down those little burrows. I thought about trying to roust one out, but felt bad to force it from its home on such a cold morning. I went on toward home. By then the sun was up and the frost was sparkling. I walked through the garden. The hard frost has finally finished off the colchicums. The blackberry leaves were pretty etched in frost. For all its destructive force, frost is beautiful.
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Yesterday morning, the beaver pond.
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Yesterday morning, the beaver pond.
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Frost by the mystery animal den.
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Yesterday morning, the meadow.
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Yesterday morning, the sun rises.
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The colchicums succumb to the frost.
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Frosted blackberry leaves.
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Later in the day we drove up to Palmyra, New York, to the Church History Sites. On our way north we stopped at the home of our Stake Patriarch, Terrence Robinson, who lives near Canandaigua Lake near the town of Canandaigua. He is a professor at Cornell University at their Geneva, New York campus and his field of expertise is fruit. He recently bought property, built a home, and planted an orchard. And what an orchard! He used a method he developed called the Geneva Tall Spindle System. The trees are grafted on dwarfing rootstock and will only grow to be 10 feet tall, with small trunks and no scaffold branches. They are fastened to a three-wire trellis, spaced three feet apart, in rows 11 feet apart. Right now he has 23,000 trees planted on the rise behind his house. He only planted three varieties, Honeycrisp, Gala, and Snapdragon. It is a very impressive orchard. My orchard isn’t anything like that. Bro. Robinson’s orchard is an efficient commercial orchard. My 30 heirloom apple trees are just for my own use, for pies, sauce, and cider. But it was great to see that huge orchard and to talk apples with an expert.
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Driving along Canandaigua Lake.
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The Robinson's orchard.
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| The Robinson's orchard. |
We left the Robinson’s and drove on to Palmyra where we met up with the Thayns. Tabor’s parents are visiting them and they all drove up to Niagara Falls that morning and then over to the sites. We ate lunch in the parking lot at the visitors center at the Smith Farm. After that we walked through the sites. The sites are closed, the interior tours, that is. The grounds are open. We walked to the log cabin, through the Sacred Grove, and then to the frame house. There was hardly any other people there, which was nice. From there we drove over to the Hill Cumorah. We drove right to the top and walked around. It was getting late in the day by then, so we headed home. The drive all day was very pretty. The trees up there still have some color. Driving among the hills and along the lake was beautiful. We got home after dark and settled in for the night. Tabor’s parents are staying over at the Shillig’s house. Everyone else is here and the house is full of fun.
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The log cabin at the Smith Farm.
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In the Sacred Grove.
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At the Sacred Grove.
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The Smith Farm.
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The Palmyra Temple.
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Florence in a flowerbed at the Smith Farm.
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This morning we all went to church. Our little branch met all together for the first time in many weeks today. Before this, we were meeting in two separate groups. It was nice to see people from the other group we hadn’t seen in a while. Now we are home from church and preparations for lunch are underway. The Thayns are staying until tomorrow, so there will be lots of things going on for the rest of the day. After lunch there are plans to take a walk. It’s a bit chilly and windy out, but that’s what fall is like here. There will be games and goodies. It’s good to be together.
