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It has started to snow again after two days of being pleasantly calm and only a bit sprinkly. We are currently officially at 3.7 meters with more in some place and less in others (12.14 feet). Tomoe does nothing but stare through the kitchen window. If it gets any worse I may have to let her in.

It finally warmed up enough that the snow on our roof slid off. We have been waiting because we want to shovel the area around the house, but have been afraid to go near it for fear of it avalanching on-top of us. Still, it is too cold to completely dispose of the snow in front of our house, so for now we just dug a tunnel to the firewood.

The sound of the snow sliding off the roof is very loud, so we knew when it started and had time to go outside to watch the show. Better than fireworks if you ask me. The only down-side is that it is also fun to be inside the house as it slides. It feels like a small earthquake, but not as scary because we know what is going on. Although, this year is a bit more worrisome with the snow because the back half of our house is very visibly leaning since the quake last April. For all we know the weight of two meters of snow crushing down on it might be a bit much.

We went “downtown” today to take Mona to her two-year doctor visit. We are terrible parents because she is one-kilogram below the average weight range for her age (not sure the nurse has stopped to think that maybe the other kids skew the average by eating too many cookies) and she has minor frost-bite on her feet (she refuses to wear socks and we refuse to heat the floor). The doctor had to really scrape the bottom, though and mentioned her strangely shaped head. That is Tomoe’s fault because apparently she did something bad while giving birth. At least Mona had clean teeth, but I don’t think we get any points for that as the local pre-school teacher’s kid had millimeter thick layer of plaque and scum on his teeth and the nurse said “Don’t worry. That is unavoidable with children”.

The photos are from the village center. The tall white pillar indicates the record for deepest snow in an inhabited area in Japan (it is, of course, much deeper on mountain tops). With any luck we will not match or beat the record this year, but it is always a possibility.

The village has officially declared a winter snow disaster with several meters in just a few days and a few more days of heavy snow-fall on the way.

Tomoe and I returned from a month in the US to find our house literally buried. The front door took an hour to dig out this morning, so luckily we were able to squeeze in through a narrow hole in the garage when we arrived back last night.

Our neighbors had shoveled the roof of the entrance twice, and already cleared away over two meters of snow from the front of the house before another big dump came and left what is seen in the photo above.

The entrance is still not shoveled because there is not enough water flowing through the underground trenches to melt all the snow. If too much is dumped in there the entire street begins to flood and the neighbors are not too happy about that (as I found out earlier today)

I am afraid to shovel behind the house because there is a meter of snow on the roof just waiting to slide off. I certainly don’t want to be shoveling under it when it does. I also don’t want to make a wrong step and end up in our backyard pond that is now surrounded by three meter walls of snow.

All the family has gone back to South Carolina or Korea save Mona and me. Thursday we too are off to Seattle for a week so tomorrow is Mona’s last day with Grandma and Grandpa. Tomoe has been in Seattle for a week already, and until tonight Mona has been extremely calm about it – so much so that I felt bed telling Tomoe that when Mona does wake up in the middle of the night she crys “Elmo” instead of “mommy”.

Tonight, I was chatting with Tomoe on skype and despite Tomoe’s pleas for Mona to interact with her, Mona was all but ignoring. Even when Mona was ready for bed we could not get her to say goodnight or even wave – until I hung up and took her to brush her teeth that is.

Brushing her teeth is always like performing an exorsim, and though I did have a little more trouble holding her down tonight, I didn’t make the connection until I finished and let her up and she rushed out of the bathroom to computer screaming “po-po” (Korean for “kiss”, a word we adopted from my sister’s family) I got Tomoe on skype again and Mona spent five minutes kissing the screen again and again and again. I stopped counting at about twenty-five. Then, when she was done she happily went to bed and smiled and laughed and asked for a pre-bed snack… of broccoli.

More from the festivities.

No particular reason for not updating the blog, other than getting ready to go to, and finally making the journey to grandma and grandpa’s house in Michigan.

Its a bit worrisome leaving home for a month when we had a meter and a half of snow in just the four days before leaving. I was out shoveling for eight hours, but know full well that by the time our plane took off, the snow was most likely up to the roof again. There is a serious possibility that our house will be under snow by the time our return flight touches down.

Michigan has been great. All Mona’s aunts uncles and cousins are visiting from around the world. Its a crazy time at Grandma’s house this week.

The snow is falling. We have a foot or so on the ground and it will be snowing all night. Its great because it means that many of the the getting ready for the snow preparations that are not done yet will just have to remain un-done. The to-do list just got a lot shorter.

In the meantime, I didn’t really get a chance to get out and enjoy the snow. Instead I enjoyed peeling and sorting more persimmon. We have about 800 drying, and many more being made into vinegar or puree. Hopefully all this work will not be in vain and we will get a chance to sell it all after it has magically morphed into Tomoe’s all-local, almost-all-organic, no-sugar, vegan and macrobiotic friendly persimmon & brown-rice cookies.

While I do love no-sugar cookies as much as the next guy, I am man enough to say that usually one can easily tell that the cookie is, in fact, healthy. Not so with these persimmon wonders. It is sweet enough to make any two-year old screaming “mo mo mo moooooooh!” and thick and hearty enough to make a healthy hiking snack with substance that is as filling as it is compact.

Can’t wait to get into production and selling them.

All good things must come to an end. Persimmon season ended early for me this year as I, in my rush to eat as many fresh persimmon as possible in the next two weeks before we have to leave them to ferment as we heat to the US, had quite a scare last night.

Vomiting after gorging on any one particular fruit like I did only seems normal, and not being able to sleep because of the constant gurgling in my stomach and two potentially lethal stumbles down the stairs in the dark without my glasses to the toilet where all twenty-plus persimmon eventually ended up, is not frightening in itself.

What is frightening is that nausea is one of the symptoms of persimmon stones. A condition whereby the astringents in the persimmon bond with inedible material in the stomach creating a big rock that is too large to pass through the intestines.

This is apparently quite a common thing in Japan, especially in areas near persimmon orchards, and it does not take a lifetime of eating persimmon – it can happen if you just eat five persimmon once on an empty stomach, especially with the skins, as I do.

Sometimes they can use an endoscopic tool and smash it into pieces, but often it is too hard, so until recently, the only way to get rid of it was to cut the stomach open and pull it out. Then, some brilliant doctor heard that Coca cola will melt bones and decided to try it on a persimmon stone.

I was feeling better in the morning, but am stilled worried, so as a precautionary measure I have already chugged four two-liter bottles of Coke today. I am feeling a bit sick again (worse, in fact), so its back to the corner store for more. I won’t stop drinking Coke until this nausea subsides.

the photos are completely unrelated shots of Mona and Mom taking a walk.

Another official custom-made family holiday Mona will grow up with is Kaki Week – the week (actually longer) that we pick, peel, and hang persimmons to dry. We have spent three nights this week working on about four-hundred, and tomorrow I will brave the fresh snow to pick more.

The pressure is on, however, as we planned to use our stove to dry them in the living room, but this year we will be heading to the US at the end of the month, so there will be no one here to keep the fire going. We gotta get the persimmons reasonably dried before then so we don’t return to one-thousand moldy little orange blobs.

The year is especially important as the persimmon are now a cash crop for us. Anyone who has seen the perfectly dried persimmons in the stores will know that we can’t sell our ugly, seed-full monsters simply as dried persimmon, but Tomoe makes some mean cookies and breads using the persimmon to sweeten instead of sugar, and they have a much lower footprint than imported rasins – and they are one of the few fruits available in such quantity (and for free) that are not grown with pesticides.

Any persimmons that we don’t have time to peel and dry will be thrown into a bucket to make persimmon vinegar, which also sells for a good price considering the little very effort that goes into its production.

With all the unpicked persimmon trees within a one hour radius of our house (we know where each and every one is along the main road) we could theoretically make enough money with this to live the entire year.

The photos are all after the first night. There are three times this after tonight.

Around this time people ask if I miss having a traditional Thanksgiving or winter holiday season. To be honest, no. Not at all. Not to say I don’t miss family, but I dont miss them any more on “special” days than I miss them on regular days.

We make no special effort to bring the holidays to Japan by dressing up for halloween or putting up stockings for christmas (my sister in Korea does enough of that for ten ex-pat families). Our thanksgiving dinner was a just more of the same fabulous food we always eat, and I didn’t even realize it was “Thanksgiving Dinner” until the next day.

With Mona here though, I did start to feel a bit guilty that she would not have some kind of special traditions to enjoy as a child – memories to mark the passage of time such as getting sick from eating all the hallowing candy at once, eating stuffing and pumpkin pie for thanksgiving, and having to wait until it was officially time to come out of our rooms on Christmas morning.

Sure there are festivals here too, and while we participate in a very small way with obon, new-year, spring planting break festival, etc. it is not the same for her as for the other kids. For her it is simply an hour or two when we walk out the door and get together with the other people in the hamlet, come home and life is back to normal. For the other people here it is several days of family visiting and an entirely different atmosphere creating memories they carry with them for life.

Then, the other day as we were eating what we randomly decided to count as our thanksgiving meal. I realized that she will probably have some very special memories that I didn’t get growing up, and maybe even many of the children living here don’t get.

For one thing, Mona will, I think, be far more sensitive to the seasons than most people I know, and “Nozawa Pickling Day” will become one of our official custom-made family holidays to mark time. The yearly trek to the nozawana field in the cold, lugging it back home to be washed in the near-freezing river water, sometimes in a cold rain, sometimes in the snow.

And we can’t forget the first taste of this years nozawa pickles, a flavor that changes throughout the winter. Its amazing how wonderful it tastes and easy it is to forget about how tired you had grown to them after a winter were nozawana is one of the only greens available.

For her, most every autumn meal will be a thanksgiving meal comprised almost completely of the flavors of fall. Fresh rice (tastes completely different than it will in a few months), mushroom soup from freshly harvested wild mushrooms (which has saddly passed, and we were unable to find anymore as we hiked today), the first taste of this year’s pickled Nozawana leaves, and perfectly mushy persimmon for dessert.

With winter, we will be eating mostly rice, pickled Nozawana, and miso soup with root vegetables with hardened well-dried persimmons for dessert. Fresh greens will be a luxury item, as will be the occasional mochi cooked on the fire stove (she loved that tonight)

Spring will bring the fuki, bamboo shoot soup every day, tender young ferns. All of these are foods that we love, but are never too sad to say goodbye until next spring.

Summer is eda-mame, tomatoes, fresh leafy greens, mullberries, raspberries, watermelon, grapes.

I suppose it could be considered child neglect or abuse to not have strawberries in winter in a world where everything is available at any time of the year from the supermarket, but at least it is giving her a bit of a tradition and she will grow up to know the passing of the seasons means more than just the color of the leaves and a few more layers of clothing.