It is almost Spring again.  You can feel it in the air tonight.  Inside our local restaurant twigs of plum are flowering but it will be a good few weeks until the outdoor ones show some petal.  Last year the wife and I helped to pick plums in Kamibun.  As always, it was a blissful experience.  I honestly wouldn’t mind being a fruit picker full-time.  Whilst you work it’s easy to get into the ‘plum zone’ because each tree is dripping with fruit and they are so easy to pick.  Our buckets fill up quickly and get replaced quietly before they overflow (Did you know? A bucket of plums is fairly heavy).  The vitality and general genkiness that the oldsters carry is amazing; I truly hope that I can be the same when I am their age (but it is probably too late now, I should have started earlier).

The plums get hand sorted into ‘shat’ and ‘good’ piles.  The good ones will go to market, the shat ones will go somewhere else (probably to be used for making plum wine).

The good:

The shat:

Looking down the valley it is difficult not to get all glassy.  The landscape has changed so much in 50 years.  Before the radical planting of rapid growing trees on every available plot of land it was easy to see what your neighbours were up to.  I ask if it was better before and they reply ‘No because you had to be really careful how you lived.  You couldn’t leave stuff outside your house or do anything without your neighbour watching.  It is better now because it is more private.’  Fair enough.

Over a shochu I ask which is more painful, a mukade bite or a hornet sting or a snake bite.  Both of the men looked at each other and said snake.  The most dangerous snake, the pit viper, can be deadly.  Apparently the pain is excrutiating.  One of the chaps recounted a story from his youth when he managed to catch one of these snakes with his bare hands.  He had this snake by the head in one hand when he saw another one by his leg.  He tried to grab that as well but it bit him.  He was laughing as he remembered standing in the bushes with a snake in one hand and the other hanging off his arm!