The Difference Experience.

When I first moved to Higashi Mukojima, this was one of the sights that thrilled me the most, this little house that I passed on my way to and from the train station every day.



That's a pretty vertiginous view, sorry. Here's a straighter one, taken about a month later:



A very old woman lived in that little corner house. Sometimes I'd walk by in the afternoon and hear the television; she was watching her stories, just like my grandmother used to do in the afternoon. (It made me happy and homesick to hear it.) In the mornings, she would sweep the street in front of her house, slowly and carefully, moving the way very old people do. Then she would toss water over the cleaned street, a way of keeping down the dust. She had many little potted plants, as you can see, and her plants were so happy that they glowed and hummed. Everything flowered for her, cacti flowered next to lilies flowered next to geraniums. My grandmother had the same way with plants.



Beautiful, isn't it?

That house is gone now. It was gone long before I left Tokyo, turned into a corner of a parking lot for a highrise apartment building. I wonder where the old woman went. A nursing home? To live with family? I don't know, obviously.

But while it existed, that house thrilled me because, I mean, who does that? In one of the biggest, most impersonal megalopolises in the world, here is this woman putting her little potted garden right out in the street. (And it truly was right on the street. There are no sidewalks on the smaller streets in Tokyo, only on the larger thoroughfares.) True, this was the "old (or low) town" part of the city, shitamachi, where there were still many traditional homes that had escaped the WWII firebombings that leveled most of the rest of the city (only to be razed to make way for highrise apartment buildings), and no one ever bothered her plants, stole or vandalized them. (In fact, I never saw any vandalism in my little corner of Tokyo, no graffiti or litter. Not ever.)

I lived right around the corner from her then. And this is where I live now:



Ah!

That's the front of the casita. And this is off to the side, near the door:



That woman and I, I suspect, are like one of those puzzles where you look at two pictures that are identical except for a handful of miniscule things, no?

Unlike the Edokko whose house and garden I marveled at, I haven't a green thumb. Dave handles all the difficult stuff, but I can water and deadhead spent flowers and do things like arrange and rearrange pots. I don't wear yukata and geta in the summer to step out and sweep every day and I don't sprinkle water to keep down the dust. (I live in the desert now, it's all dust.) I don't watch soap operas in the afternoon, either, nor does it seem like my plants have the same trust in me that hers did in her. Mine seem more concerned about the future somehow, here at a mile above sea level, and often consequently less content. Is the difference experience, do you think?