雪

Sleep patterns are taking their sweet time about righting themselves, but fortunately I haven't slept through anything important. Just about. I pulled open my curtains on Sunday morning (well, afternoon, to be accurate) and was greeted by a scene of sparkling whiteness. Verily, snow I had noticed falling the night before in an "Oh, fancy that," sort of way had settled and was continuing to fall. In a flash I was wrapped up in my Winter gear and out the door to explore this snowy new world. The snow was already several inches thick and my feet made satisfying scrunchy noises as I walked, though it was still coming down with such force that a layer began to settle on my coat even though I kept moving.

Eventually I found myself in a graveyard. There's a perfectly normal sentence for describing my day. Well, there's a really big one nearby that I'd been meaning to visit, the biggest in Aichi prefecture, in fact. So big that it was divided up into sections marked by signs with cute pictures of animals on them. A graveyard under a heavy covering of snow is a sight worth seeing. Gravestones stretched out as far as the eye could see, much of the snow completely undisturbed but for my own footprints. The graves I saw were mostly family graves, the kind where the stone has space for several names, so they can be added as members of the family shuffle off the mortal coil.

This set me thinking about death and responsibility - upkeep of these graves becomes the responsibility of the living relatives, much as it is a kind of responsibility to keep the memory of lost ones alive. My own maternal grandmother passed away recently, and I considered that it was sad I would never visit her house again (though she'd been living in a home for many years and that house has since been converted into student accommodation), but that I did at least have some memories to carry with me.

On Monday it was also snowing, though only lightly, and the sun was shining as well. As I set off toward Uni a question popped into my head - why wasn't it cold? Certainly, the temperature was somewhere in the single digits, but I am used to England, where if ever it does snow the air will be bitterly freezing. Here in Japan, though, I was able to enjoy the light, sparkling flakes falling from the sky without wrapping up very much. I recalled that when I first came to Japan and was finding it hard I'd considered quitting after the first semester. I'm glad I decided instead to stick with it the entire year for all sorts of reasons, among them that I was able to see this snow and simply marvel at its prettiness rather than curse delays it was causing to my journey (see entries about my trip home). 

At Uni I spent lots of money, mainly on bills and buying textbooks. Lessons are starting again soon. A bit excited at the idea of getting back into the swing of things. As fun as sleeping until the afternoon then spending the rest of the day online is, it's no way to live a life. More on the situation as it develops!