Life In Japan: Annual Neighborhood Barbecue

Posted on July 16, 2019 by johnrachel

Notice something about the barbecue in the photo? 

There are two things. 

Typically in the U.S. barbecuing is open flame, either over wood, charcoal, or with more sophisticated high-tech grills, over gas.  In Japan, it can be any of those, but just as often barbecuing is done with a hot plate, as shown.  Conveniently, they have hot plates for indoor barbecuing, both at home and at restaurants. 

We own a high-temperature electric griddle so we can barbecue in the middle of winter or during a typhoon without filling the house with smoke or being asphyxiated. 

Secondly, I’m used to seeing mounds of meat and only meat.  Yes, they also barbecue mounds of meat here: Unbelievably delicious beef, pork and sausages, though rarely hamburgers and hot dogs.  But the Japanese also love to barbecue just about anything else that can be barbecued!  The volunteer chef above is “barbecuing” — actually stir-frying — noodles with cabbage.  Later, he removed the plate and open-grilled the entire range of items for the day’s feast.  Corn, squash, onions, eggplant, potatoes, different varieties of mushrooms, garlic cloves, squid.

It seemed odd to me when I first arrived.  Now it makes total sense.  Barbecued vegetables are fantastic!  And don’t get me started about squid.  Squid is one of those things I thought was completely weird before I moved here.  Squid and octopus.  Now I’m totally addicted.

We have a village barbecue at our community center every year in the middle of July.  The neighborhood organization pulls out all the stops.  A splendid time is had by all!

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Life In Japan: The Naked American

Posted on July 6, 2019 by johnrachel

I taught English full-time here in Japan for a whole year in 2008.  There were all levels of classes, all ages, from beginner to advanced, from 4-year-olds to folks in their eighties.

One Friday morning in August or September, I walked into my advanced English class, situated at a cross-cultural community center on the edge of town, and it was obvious something was being shared my students thought was funny which I apparently wasn’t supposed to know.  They were giggling and looking conspicuously guilty.  It was a small class, only five students, and I guess I caught them somewhat by surprise.  Which itself didn’t make sense, since it was one-minute before class was supposed to start.  Perhaps they wanted to be caught in their conspiratorial pow wow.

“Okay, students.  What were you talking about?  What’s so funny?”

“Nothing, JD.  We were laughing about something?”  As they continued to giggle.

“We have no secrets here.  You’re required to tell me what your conversation was all about.  I think it might be a law.”

(Conferring among themselves.)

“Should we tell him?”

“Really?”

“I’m embarrassed.  You tell him.”

“No, you tell him.”

Finally, one of them spoke up.

“Uh . . . it’s just . . . actually . . . you have a nickname here in Sasayama.”

“A nickname.  I have a nickname?  What nickname?”

“Yes.  People here call you [more giggles] . . . the naked American.”

“The naked American?  The naked American!  I don’t understand.  Why would they call me the naked American?”

“Well . . . people see you riding around on your bike without a shirt.”

Without a shirt.

I thought about it.  I’d never really noticed.  Did I ever see any guys without their shirts?  It’s not something I really pay much attention to.

Of course, in the U.S. it’s very common in hot weather for us fellows to whip off our shirts to stay cool.  There are even signs in convenience stores:  No Shirts, No Shoes, No Service!

I started to look around.  I’ve been paying attention to this important item now for about eleven years.  And quite honestly, I have only seen a man without a shirt once or twice. 

In eleven years!

This reminds me of my three months in Nepal, a rustic, conservative country.  For six weeks I lived in a beautiful town called Pokhara, enjoying its natural beauty, lovely lake, Peace Stupa, friendly locals, great hiking, calm.

I specifically remember thinking how insensitive many Western girls were.  All of the local women dressed very modestly, as Hindus and Muslims, covering themselves head to toe in beautiful genuis, informal sari-like gowns.

It was very obvious what the local standards of modesty were.  Agree with them or not, this was their culture and I thought it appropriate to be respectful.  Yet, because the weather in Pokhara was hot to very hot, the ladies from Australia, Europe, and so on, walked around in halters and bikini tops with their bellies bared, side boobs and cleavage in full display.  Then there were the shorts, short shorts, very short shorts.  The overall effect was more exposed flesh than covered.

How inconsiderate!

How insensitive!

How rude!

Uh . . . sort of like me riding around on my bicycle without a shirt here in Japan.

Busted . . . and humbled!

At the same time, I now understand things are changing in the U.S. in some unanticipated ways.  Not that I have any intention of going back to witness the new “freedoms” in person, I just read that women can go topless now in six states in the U.S., as decided in a recent federal court ruling.  “It’s a huge victory for plaintiffs Brit Hoagland and Samantha Six, who sued the city [Fort Collins, CO] over its law as part of the #FreeTheNipple movement, calling it an attack on gender inequality.”

See?  I was WAY AHEAD of my time, the creator of a new social movement, and I didn’t even realize it — the #FreeTheNipple movement!

I’m so heartened that people are putting time and energy into the real threats to happiness and health here on this planet.

 

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Life In Japan: Lotus Flowers, a Castle, and a Moat

Posted on June 25, 2019 by johnrachel

We have a 400-year-old castle in the center of town.  Well, to be fair it’s really the ruins of a castle.  Even so, it’s an impressive sight and many of our festivals and fairs are held in an area adjacent to the castle compound.  It’s completely surrounded by cherry trees, so it’s a popular spot during the Cherry Blossom festival, and whenever the weather is good, for families and friends to picnic, for people to stroll.  The castle and surrounds are also frequented by local artists. 

The inside of the castle grounds has a large wooden structure which functions as a visitors center and museum, telling of the history and function of the original castle, which burned to the ground some time ago.  It was, as were all such structures in Japan from this period, made entirely of wood. 

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Sasayama was not an important military outpost.  The castle served as a way-station for the visiting samurai.  But like all castles of its time, protection from hostile takeover was a basic requirement.  Its first level of fortification consisted of moats, an outer moat and an inner moat.  These obviously wouldn’t be very effective against cruise missiles or Predator drones but they served the purpose at the time, erecting a formidable obstacle at the time for any aggressors, who were usually on foot.

Now the moats perform an entirely different function.  Both inner and outer moats are the home of ducks, which spend their days floating, gliding, hanging out, dunking for debris on the bottom, and of course, making more ducks. I haven’t seen any of them ducking, however, since there is no duck hunting, at least around the castle, or anywhere in Japan that I know of.

And then there are the turtles.  Turtles are horrible conversationalists, slow, lumbering, in my opinion, very dull creatures. Our local turtles focus exclusively on loitering, sunbathing, meditating, doing what turtles have been doing long before the castle was built — say going back at least four million years.  Turtles are behaviorally a quite stable species, to put it mildly. Frankly, I’m still puzzled why anyone would want a turtle as a pet. A medium-size rock provides the same amount of companionship and requires less maintenance.

Anyway . . . 

The moats definitely offer the many visitors who visit this historic site, something more interesting to experience and enjoy than the stone wall fortification — the second line of defense — which forms the base the entire perimeter of the castle grounds.

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One of the outer moats also has a very special function.  In spring and summer, the city rents row boats.  No jet skis, no submarines, no hover craft.  Only row boats.  That pretty much fits the pace here.

This year the experience of the picnickers, revelers, stroller, artists, and ducks and turtles, was dramatically heightened.  A local elementary school connecting their students with nature and community service had them plant lotus flowers.  The effect was breathtaking.

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Life In Japan: Vegetable Gardens

Posted on June 2, 2019 by johnrachel

Gardens are the thing here in Japan, especially vegetable gardens.

Growing food for personal consumption is such a part of Japanese culture, even in Tokyo, by population the largest city in the world, there are plot-share farms, rooftop gardens,  and at least one major company that devotes a significant amount of its office floor space to growing an impressive variety of fruits and vegetables.

It’s commonly known that land use by the Japanese is extremely efficient, meticulous, ingenious.  Everything I’ve experienced here over 12 years, substantiates that.  Even out here in the sticks where I live, hardly under the pressures associated with the population density of cities, every patch of terra firma is treated as a valuable asset.

It’s entirely obvious why this is the case.  Compare Japan with the United States.

While both are highly-industrialized, complex and extremely modern societies, with very mobile populations, large cities, vast swaths of land allocated to industrial-service sectors and for housing millions of people, Japan comes up short from the get go.  The total area of the U.S. is 3,531,905 square miles (9,147,592 square km).  Japan is only 145,925 square miles (377,944  square km). Meaning it’s just over 4% of the size of the U.S. — Japan is about the size of Montana, just one of the 50 U.S. states. 

Yes, Japan has fewer people.  The U.S. now has just over 330 million people, Japan just under 127 million.  It’s still vastly disproportionate: Japan’s 38% of the U.S. population must use land that is at best about 4% the size of America, a continental landmass which stretches sea to shining sea, embracing vast undeveloped, underdeveloped and natural tracts in between.  Visit states like Wyoming, Nevada, Utah, Montana, Arizona, New Mexico, North and South Dakota, Texas, and you’ll see what I mean.

Moreover, a considerable amount of land in Japan consists of mountainous terrain.  Japan was formed in ancient times by volcanoes.  While this offers beautiful landscapes and good trekking, the short of it is that there’s much less usable land in Japan.  Much less!  Only 12% of the land in Japan is arable, compared to 20% for the U.S.

So Japanese put every square meter they do have to good use, and make it work for them. 

Add to that the nutritional benefits of eating food that’s not produced by factory farming, but grown in small amounts without machinery and a minimum — sometimes none at all — of chemicals.  The result is in Japan, vegetable gardens are ubiquitous.  Here in my own community of Sasayama, it seems like everyone has a vegetable garden.

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Even yours truly gets in on the action from time to time.  As a city-boy born and raised in the industrial heartland of Detroit, Michigan I have to confess to a bit of awe when a seed or two actually sprouts, grows, and I end up with the fruits and vegetables of my personal labor on the dinner table.  Here is the naked American getting things ready to plant some seedlings.

That was last season, working our vegetable row, a single strip my wife and I rent from a neighbor.  We ended up with tomatoes, bell peppers, zucchini, eggplant, onions, garlic, a couple melons which got stolen by some local monkeys, then late in the season soybeans.

Credit where it’s due:  Masumi actually knows what she’s doing.  I pretty much defer to her on anything agricultural.  On the other hand, she doesn’t know how to rebuild a Ford V-8 engine.  We each have our specialties.






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Life In Japan: National Holidays

Posted on May 28, 2019 by johnrachel

Coming of Age Day: January 14, 2019, Tokyo, Japan.

Here are the official national holidays and dates for Japan in 2019 . . .

New Year’s Day: Jan 1 (self-explanatory).

Coming of Age Day: Jan 14 (turning 20 means adulthood, so all the new 20-year-olds dress up in kimonos and yukatas and have a party).

National Foundation Day:  Feb 11 (a very old celebration going back to 660 BCE when Emperor Jimmu ascended the Chrysanthemum Throne and Japan was born).

Vernal Equinox Day:  Mar 21 (yes, the Japanese celebrate the spring equinox!).

Showa Day:  Apr 29 (the first holiday on the Japanese calendar commemorating the birthday of the Showa emperor).

Constitution Memorial Day:  May 3 (commemorating the inauguration of the current Japanese constitution, back in 1947).

Greenery Day:  May 4 (celebrating and expressing thanks for nature and its splendor).

Children’s Day:  May 5 (celebrating kids!).

Marine Day:  Jul 15 (celebrating the ocean and the sun and the bounty they provide).

Mountain Day:  Aug 11-12 (lots of mountains here and they’re honored for contributing to happiness and natural beauty).

Respect for the Aged Day:  Sept 16 (the elderly are accorded great respect all throughout Asia, but this day is specially dedicated to honoring them; lots of flowers and cards).

Autumnal Equinox Day:  Sept 23 (heading into fall; the harvest after all is a big deal!)

Health-Sports Day:  Oct 14 (honoring health, fitness, sports).

Culture Day:  Nov 3-4 (people go to museums, also celebrate the post-war announcement of the new constitution, and the birthday of Emperor Meiji).

Labor Thanksgiving Day:  Nov 23 (unions march to celebrate labor rights, farmers give final thanks for the harvest, hopefully a fruitful and profitable one).

Notice anything missing?  Where are the military parades?  Where is the nationalism?  The self-aggrandizing political speeches?

Short answer:  There aren’t any military celebrations.  Maybe honoring the constitution is “political” in a way.  It celebrates the political framework of Japan, but I believe without being nationalistic.  The birth of the country?  Again, it’s about self-respect rather than superiority and “indispensability”.

Most holidays, as is evident, are very innocent, focusing on people and nature.  Celebrating mountains?  The oceans?  The position of the Earth in its orbit around the sun?  Old folks? Kids?  Adolescents becoming adults?  Without getting drunk and hurling bottles at passing motorists?  Or eating seven times my body weight in barbecued ribs? 

Some westerners might be tempted to sneer and make some snarky remark.

I can’t help but smile and be grateful I’m not hearing war drums, 21-gun salutes, and parades of politicians moralizing about the honor of dying on the battlefield.

I’d rather thank the trees for being so green, the sun for showing up on time.






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Life In Japan: Ground Golf

Posted on May 10, 2019 by johnrachel

There’s “community life” in my community.

In my village called Noma, which is on the very eastern edge of town, as I’ve mentioned before, we get together regularly to clean up the “neighborhood”.  Of course, most of the area which hosts the 40 or 50 houses in our village consists of rice and soybean fields.  When I refer to the neighborhood, I’m actually talking about the irrigation canals and ditches, retainer walls, our shrine hillock dedicated to Benten, a goddess of art and music.  We also have an annual barbecue, our curry and bingo party, and a number of ceremonies celebrating holidays throughout the year.

That’s just my local village get-togethers.  Mind you, similar ones are taking place across the entire city, in each of the twelve or so local villages.  All of these are organized as neighborhood happenings, where it’s likely everyone attending will be at least somewhat familiar with one another.  

Then there’s all of the city-wide activities for Sasayama — just this past May renamed Tambasasayama [丹波篠山市] in a special election — organized for all 42,000 of the city’s residents.  I’ve mentioned elsewhere the Dekansho Festival in August and the Festival of the Portable Shrines.  There are many more — tea festivals, sports day festivals, the black bean (soybean) festival, wild boar festival, as well as street fairs, special markets, and so on.  For a relatively small city, there are certainly a lot of officially organized events.  But this is true for all of Japan.

There’s one activity, however, I’d like to call special attention to.  Because it’s just so darn charming, and so thoroughly Japanese!  That’s the game of Ground Golf that takes place, weather permitting, every day here for six or seven months out of the year.

Not that Ground Golf is Japanese.  I don’t know where the game originated.  Being called ‘golf’ certainly suggests non-Asian roots.

It’s just the idea of it!  As the photo shows at the head of this article, it takes place on a huge flat field of sand.  The city maintains this play area just for Ground Golf.  There’s not much else it could be used for.  Maybe a beach, if climate change causes a 150-meter rise in the level of the ocean.

Why do they have this?  To give old folks something to do and an excuse to socialize.

Can you imagine?

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Life In Japan: Planting Soybeans

Posted on April 18, 2019 by johnrachel

Sasayama, the traditional rural town I live in, is famous throughout Japan for two food items.

One is wild boar.  We even have a wild boar festival!  Can’t say I get very excited about wild boar, either in the wild, or tearing up the local farm land, or on the plate.  Cooked it looks like pork but to my taste buds has a weird flavor.

The other item is black beans, better known as soybeans. 

Soybeans are eventually harvested in two stages.  When they first mature, they are green and relatively soft.  They are best eaten fresh, right off the vine, boiled for 12-15 minutes. 

When you go to a Japanese restaurant and order edamame — 枝豆 — this is what you’re eating.  They are served in the pod, which is boiled and lightly salted, and you pop the green beans into your mouth.  Delicious!  And nutritious!

Many of the soybeans are left on the vine to mature to the second stage of harvesting.  They become very dry and extremely hard, and they turn BLACK!  The advantage is that these can be stored without refrigeration and used throughout the year for a whole variety of recipes.  Black beans are even extensively used in very sweet soups and pastries.

Regardless of whether they end up as “immature” young green beans or black beans, the whole business starts in spring with the planting.  My wife Masumi and I even get in on the action, planting a couple rows we rent from our neighbor.

Fasten your seat belts. The excitement builds fast as we make some holes, then insert greenhouse-grown seedlings, push the dirt back in the hole, wait, read a book, build an atomic submarine in a bottle out of used match sticks, wait some more, fertilize the plant a couple times in the summer, keep waiting (patience is very important in farming) as momentum on the soybean growing scene steadily keeps gathering steam.  Did I mention there’s quite a bit of waiting involved?  Then finally sometime in October it all climaxes in a earth-shaking, rib-rattling, jaw-dropping, game-changing finale (I’ve dedicated a separate article to the harvest).

Whew!  I’m surprised they haven’t made a Movie-of-the-Week out of it.

Anyway, sarcasm notwithstanding, the soybean fields are quite beautiful.  And the farmers are very hard-working folks.  Masumi and I are hobbyists.  The growers are the real deal.

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Life In Japan: Planting Rice

Posted on April 5, 2019 by johnrachel

Photo taken from the front door of my house.

Preparing the soil to plant rice is a wet, muddy, mucky mess.  l know because I’ve watched them prepare the fields directly in front of my house several years on and off. 

They flood the area, let is soak for several days, then drive a tractor through the mud — I’m amazed they don’t get stuck — giving it a hardy blend and a stir, because apparently having the amiable consistency of quicksand makes it more of an inviting and nurturing environs for the soon-to-be-planted rice seedlings.

The seedlings are grown in green houses by the millions, sold to the farmers, then the real fun begins.

Now there may have been a time — at least a hundred years ago — when Japanese farmers planted them by hand.  This tedious method is still practiced in parts of China and nations of Southeast Asia.  I’ve seen it myself in my travels.

But leave it to the Japanese to come up with a machine that does in minutes what used to take a week.  No need for artificial intelligence or quantum computing here.  Just good basic mechanical design does the job. 

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It’s astonishing how quickly the rice grows.  Soon our entire valley is an intense, vibrant green, going from almost incandescent lime to the rich, deep emerald of a mature plant.  Maybe I have too much time on my hands and too little excitement, but when I ride my bike through the fields of viridescent rice, I’m struck by the incredible beauty of it all. 

And to think.  This entire process starts with men — who as I noted in another article — never outgrew the desire to play in the mud.






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Life In Japan: Bamboo

Posted on March 31, 2019 by johnrachel
Bamboo Grove in Arashiyama, Kyoto, Japan.

Bamboo is amazing!

But I can’t say I thought very much about it before I moved to Japan.

Of course, everyone in America is familiar with bamboo. Maybe as a pencil holder or a curtain rod to add a “jungle flavor” to the den. But it’s a rare novelty.

I had a friend in Portland, Oregon who was experiencing a modest but annoying bamboo attack on her garden. Even under the less than ideal growing conditions for bamboo which is typical of Portland, the plant is so hardy it can spread and take over quickly. I dug up a good portion of her lawn before finding the underground shoots aggressively wreaking havoc with her flower beds and on their way to tipping over her house.

Okay . . . that was a bit of an exaggeration. The house wouldn’t have budged but it was still in the realm of possibility that the bamboo would have punched holes in the foundation of her home and started rearranging the stuff in her basement.

Think I’m kidding? Look at this photo taken right here in my home town, which by the way has almost identical weather to Portland, Oregon.

Yes, it’s exactly as it looks. Coming right up through the asphalt!

So what’s my point?

First, bamboo is one tough cookie. Both because of that and because it truly flourishes in the warmer climates across stretches of much of Asia, it is ubiquitous both in nature and in the anthropocentric world we’ve convened from the rocks and dust of Planet Earth.

Unbeknownst to me in the dark days of my bambooless ignorance, this rather simple tree has a whole host of applications. Anyone from Asia needs to just bear with me here. This is all so obvious to you. But I’m embarrassed to have to admit, before I started traveling this hemisphere, I had no clue about bamboo.

Let me expand on this with an anecdote: Every spring I see neighbors wandering around the woods directly behind our house. Sometime within a few days, several of THESE will show up on my porch, the folks in my community being the wonderfully generous people that they are . . .

. . . which can be cooked, for example, to look like this . . .

I can’t say I’m thrilled with the taste of bamboo shoots. But they’re extremely healthy and more importantly, demonstrate that if for some apocalyptic reason the supermarkets are shuttered, there are actually things growing all around us which will keep us alive!

Let’s summarize our progress. Bamboo. Pencil holders. Curtain rods. Punching holes in the pavement. Healthy cuisine.

It’s time to cut to the chase, before this article becomes unnecessarily tedious, if it hasn’t already. I’ll resort to bullet points. Among the many further uses of bamboo . . .

•  In a number of countries, bamboo is used to make tea.

•  Bamboo can be used to make fabric (sort of).

•  Bamboo is used in the kitchen for cooking.

•  Bamboo is used to make eating utensils.

•  Bamboo is so sturdy it’s used to make bars for windows.

•  Panda bears love bamboo! They thrive on it. Bamboo is 99% of their diet!

•  Bamboo makes a superb fishing pole.

•  Bamboo is used many places as a construction material, e.g. fences, scaffolding.

• Musical instruments are fashioned out of bamboo, usually flutes.

•  Bamboo can be used in self-defense, unless the assailant is heavily-armed.

•  Bamboo is used at sea as a raft, and in the Philippines as a breeding cage for mussels.

•  It makes a handy broom!

•  It can be a really big straw.

•  A walking stick.

•  A baton for conducting an orchestra.

I could go on but you get the idea.

I seriously hope now you will never again look dismissively at bamboo, viewing it as one of Nature’s odd hiccups. Like a garden mole . . . or sea cucumber . . . or a platypus.

I know I won’t.

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Life In Japan: Tilling The Soil

Posted on March 5, 2019 by johnrachel

I can’t say that growing up in Detroit exactly gave me a strong agricultural awareness.  Though for five years my mom and dad had mobile home north of the urban sprawl and the trailer park was surrounded by undeveloped land — literally fields and even a small forest — none of it was farmed.  I think the first time I saw a tractor was at the State Fair and it was parked, sparkling clean, gleaming in the artificial light of an exhibition hall.

One thing I truly enjoy about living in a farming community now is that the growing cycle parallels the cycle of seasons.  Back in Detroit, it was the weather that marked the seasonal changes.  Truth is, it’s more that the weather drives the growing cycle of food production.  This seems obvious now but simply never occurred to me.  When I was growing up, we got food at the grocery store.  How it got there wasn’t anything we worried much about.  That’s probably still true for most people.  I hear that urban kids — at least up to a certain age, around 13 or 14 — now are shocked to find out that Chicken McNuggets didn’t magically show up at the Drive-Thru window of McDonald’s, that someone raised real live animals, chopped off their heads, yanked out the feathers, carved the deceased into bite-size chunks.  This imagery is not exactly mouth-watering. 

Anyway, as belated as my agricultural epiphany is, I’m finally aware of what’s been going on “behind the scenes” for 20,000 years now.  Please don’t laugh.  I know my ignorance is pathetic.  But better late than never.  Or is it?

I’ll pretend you didn’t answer that.

First stage in getting stuff to grow?  Preparing the soil!

Actually I can relate.  What boy doesn’t like to play in the dirt!

Preparing the soil — or more poetically, tilling the soil — takes two similar but distinct paths here.

One is churning dirt in order to grow vegetables.  This looks the same as what they do in Ohio, Iowa, and Nebraska.

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The second is what they do all over Asia, where rice is the main staple.  It is more about churning mud.

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There you have it.  I make no apologies.  This may seem mundane, quaint, or even boring to most of you.  I’ve lived in farm country now for over ten years.  I find it . . .

Comforting?

Ennobling?

Spiritual?

Actualizing?

Holistic?

As a writer, words are important to me.  So I need to find that perfect word or phrase for capturing the cognitive and emotional essence of my reaction to all this plowing, turning, separating, blending, mangling and manipulation of dirt.

Ah!  I’ve got it.  I find all of this farming stuff . . .

Really neat!






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