My Thanksgiving Week Recipe...this year

Start Sunday with an old fashioned American stomach busting Thanksgiving dinner including stuffing, mashed potatoes, bread, (very) wild rice, cranberry sauce, green beans, and turkey gravy. Replace turkey with giant square of tasty tofu. Invite loads of Japanese friends who cannot come. Eat it all with two Americans after thanking the low table and tall flowers and mini pumpkins for friends, family, and fun. Finish it off with Love Pie (complete with homemade cinnamon nutmeg whipping cream atop warm pumpkin filling) and movie.



Go to work. Teach. Talk to young and old and everyone in between in a variety of languages. Connect. Brush. Make mistakes. Make improvements. Make your way through the wondrous business of people.

Take a walk through the park Thursday morning. Jump on the monorail and then the plane and then the bus. Walk the last twenty minutes. Find lunch and books in English. Get lost at port. Get unlost at port. Take first ever ride on Toppy ferry, skimming the water's surface. Arrive in Yakushima around sunset. Enjoy a casual evening with friends in a happy little traditional Japanese home replete with sliding rice paper doors, tatami mats, and foot warming kotatsu.

Wake up at 4 am Friday. Drive up mountain to begin day-long hike. Be forced to take bus up mountain instead due to fallen rock. About an hour of windy bus mountain rides and somewhat nauseous stomachs. Disembark as the sky takes on hues of dawn. Start walking. Walk until lunch through ancient forests logged eighty years ago if not earlier. Giant house-sized life-filled stumps speak of yestercentury. Trudge up thousands of rocks. Lug over endlessly entangled exposed roots. Hike. Walk. Hike. Trees tower. Baby trees tower. Arrive at Jomon-sugi before lunch time, four or five hours later. Giant naked cedar high in the mountains. Altitude: 1300 meters. Height: 25.3 meters. Trunk circumference: 16.4 meters. Age: between 2710-7200 years old. Take pictures. Begin hike back down. Loping down old wooden causeways, slick rock steps, slithering root systems. Have favorite picnic-in-Japanese-mountain-forest ever. PBJ and Nihon tangerine. Water. Smiles. Stand up. Remain standing and moving for another four or so hours. Clouds move in over the ridges, begin to drool their cool mountain spit on us just as the final leg of the trip concludes. Bus. Windy road. Car. Drop hiking gear (water, heavy shoes) at home. Accidently also drop bodies and eyelids for a bit. Dark out again. Legs so sore. Make way to town onsen (bath house). Get naked. Shower off the days well-earned grime. Step into sulfuric hot tub with soft rock bottom in dim light surrounded by the normal nudity of every woman's evening bath. Grandma and kindergartner wash and soak beside each other. Drag tired body out into the moonlit night. Pile into car with friends. Everyone's hair is still wet with subtle sulfur scents. Head to nearby town's Euro-Japanese-riverside restaurant for great meal, warm music, finish with ice cream. Get home. Roll out futon on floor. Pile on blankets. Sleep the sleepy sleep of broken old trees.



Eat Saturday morning's french toast. Make way to waterfall. Sit and listen. Wind along oceanside roads. Macaques rest in packs across the road, listlessly grooming and being groomed. Arrive at beach. Walk barefoot upon the big grained sand and into the cool ocean waves. Sit. Listen. Watch. Talk with friends. Walk with friends. Feel the broken bits of earth and life press every surface that rhythmically pounds the general direction of the road and the little manual Suzuki with steering wheel on right, parts of thanksgiving dinner in back, and sweet sunglass, owner unknown, resting on the back seat. Make it to Stewart's house mid afternoon. Britt and Mary enjoy the big kitchen, painted living room walls, and nice conversation provided by Stewart. Grace and Paul take off up the mountain toward Shiratani Unsuikyo Forest in Susie Suzuki. Grace brushes up her nonexistent manual driving skills around steep hairpin turns, meeting more than one looming tourist bus coming down and around the one lane road quickly and carefully right for the little red compact car. Japan. Mountain. One lane. Stick shift. Buses and cars and construction. Mom, don't worry :). Paul provides superb support from the passenger seat. Numerous stalls and startups. We, Paul and Grace, arrive alive and no worse for the ware, having completed adventure number 1 (ichi ban) out of 3 for the day. Part 2, explore the bowels of the mossy magical moving magnificent mountain did i say mossy stony rooty green tree-y forest. Across suspension bridge. Over rivers and giant boulders. Slither through green and furry intestines. Trees, stumps, rocks, lichens, mosses, decay, sprout, young lonely gregarious hungry dear fawn reign. The sun set early with on fall's watch. We make it up to the ridge and Tujitoge Pass in the area known as Princess Mononoke Forest 2500 meters up and into the heart of the beast. The sun is just rolling down the other side of the mountain, shooting hot yellow good-evening fingers up the far side of the ridge at us, showering the trees with gold before we all turn around for the night. Slip, slide, sache all the way back. A few late fellow hikers with big packs. Nods and smiles exchanged. Cross the footbridge with just enough light left to see the path and the moon rise in the purple and pink milk of sky that the sun, now behind us and the mountain, had left as part of the usual passing of the torch. Stare, slack jawed, at the sight of it. Sit rears upon quiet, dusky bridge to continue to soak it up through our wide-open, moon sparkled eyes. Hop back down the last jaunt of trail, step, and path in near-dark to parking lot where Susie Suzuki and the final installment of this day's adventures await. Put her in first and roll out of now empty parking lot onto happy black windy mountain road. The moon is bright and round. Glowing white in the dark blue sky as we put her into neutral and ride the ribboning rode back down the mountain to Stewart's house. Whip garlic butter cream cheese potatoes with fork. Share chicken, brocolli, cheesy gravy, corn, mashed potato, rice pudding, warm roll meal with Okinawan coworkers Mary and Paul, Yakushima ALTs Brittany and Stewart, and Stewart's coworker, a young Japanese teacher, Noriko (face warm, cheesecake delicious). Return back to Britt's after a few more hours of lazy socializing.



Awake at 5:45 am. Pile into Britt's lovely little red car and the quiet dark ride back to the port. Hugs goodbye. The moon has made an arching journey and is now on its way brightly behind the mountains. Banana bread for breakfast made the night before in the rice cooker provided in heavy wedges. The sun begins to rise, peaking over the slick sharp line between ocean and sky, and continues its roll up the the blue as we speed over the Pacific waters back to Kagoshima. Back onto Bus. Back onto plane. Back onto monorail. Walk back through the park, where groups of laughing elderly people play some sort of croquet golf. Goquet. Kids swing on monkey bars. Silly little city trees, rare to my neighborhood, encircle the long narrow sliver of place to play. All shapes and sizes, these things, trees. Walk a couple more miles. Past the cemetery. Up the hill. Into the apartment. Tenth floor. Tired and happy. Happy and thankful.

Visuals from the weekend.



Thank you family and friends. Thank you chance and opportunity. Thank you America and Japan. Thank you earth, water, sky. Thank you legs. Thank you airplane pilot. Thank you student on corner. Thank you Spring, Summer, Winter, Fall and Spring Again. Thank you Minnesota. Thank you trees. Thank you breath. Thank you big things. Thank you small things. Things I know and don't know. Things I will know. Things I'll never know.