My forest

Yesterday I started to write about how we ended up in out house in Nikko. I wanted to show you pictures Choco and I took of the forest behind us.


When I was choosing colleges way back when, I absolutely fell in love with the Lewis and Clark campus in Portland, Oregon. There were other reasons why I chose that college but I must admit I loved the beauty surrounding the dorms and walking through the forest to get to classes. I would get all choked up flying BACK to school and looking from the airplane window down on the lush greenery below.


When Tetsu and I were thinking of buying a house we had to look in the outlying farming areas just because it was too expensive to buy anything in the city. That was fine with me since I would rather look out on a tree than on another building. The house we found is beside a forest and I loved it! I worried for the first few years that some developer might cut down the forest to build more homes but it doesn't look like it is going to happen in my lifetime. Without the forest I don't think our house has that much appeal and to some people, what with the bugs and the snakes and the shade and the nothingness behind us, they probably wouldn't want to live here even if someone paid them. Tetsu's mother and sister do not like our house at all. Too dark. Too far away from everything. No stores or buses or any other conveniences. Tetsu even finds the month when I am in the States and he is alone here, very... lonely. I don't understand that at all. We have a whole neighborhood on one side of us! Why would a forest make you feel lonely?

The first time I went walking through the forest I choked up just like when I would fly back to Portland!


"A fairy land! Look at all the ferns and the green! Smell the trees and the dirt! Listen to all the birds and the frogs!"

I love my forest. In this season the trees seem like they are wearing Charleston dresses with their tiers of leaves.


There are tiny wildflowers poking up from under tree stumps and large almost tropical plants that shoot up tall and proud.


I am entranced with my forest probably like no one else in my neighborhood (except for maybe Choco) and so I really do consider it mine!