Year 6 in Kyoto – episode 4

Guess what? It’s tree time again!

Hello and welcome to part one of a two part posting in which you will see more voluptuously voyeuristic tree photos than you thought possible in two sittings. Theoretically, all of this should be in only one post but there are so many fabulous photos, that I can’t bring myself to reduce them down that much. Sitting in the folder for this post are around 300 photos of trees! Now, don’t panic, I am not going to put in anywhere near that many, and the difficult task of culling is yet to come for me, but at least it is a rather pleasurable difficulty…

The truth about hanami…

Spring has well and truly sprung here and the weather is gradually improving, with days in the 20s now dominating the weather. The warmest day we have had this year, so far, was 27C – glorious. I wore a t-shirt and sandals! It felt like real freedom; lighter clothing, my feet un-socked (can I use that as a term?) and no cold wind. The puffs are all put away. I have heard some people call this time ‘the greening’, and it does seem an apt term to me. Our garden is turning green again, with all our plants now sprouting. We have even had the first flowers from one of our irises, a gorgeous yellow bearded iris.

Speaking of our garden, we have had to do a little re-arranging, as we found some plants just didn’t like where we initially put them. We have also had to replace some plants which just haven’t coped with the last two winters – too cold then too much snow. Unfortunately one of these was the purple princess flower bush, which I loved. I couldn’t find a suitable endemic plant that was purple to replace it, so we decided to replace it with a camellia which we know can survive the winters here.

We found the geisha plants weren’t overly happy during winter too and tended to die back completely, so we have put two of the three into pots and replaced them with a couple of wisteria plants. We also had to move the dogwood tree and have replaced it with a white magnolia. Hopefully these changes will mean a more settled garden which can grow happily. Fingers crossed.

In terms of natural phenomena, we have also had at least four earthquakes near us in the last two weeks, which is a little unusual. While there are earthquakes in Japan basically every day, we don’t get too many around us. They haven’t been very strong, more in the medium magnitude 3 – 5 range at the epicentre, which translated to about magnitude 1 – 3 for us. Interestingly, I have had to add a new descriptor to my earthquake scale – the Double Hit. Two of the four recent earthquakes fall into this category. We have never experienced this type of quake before. The first time we felt this we were watching tv; we felt the slight movement and heard the house creak, and thought ‘good, that was not so bad’, then a couple of seconds later it happened again. Somewhat unnerving.

The second time this type of quake happened, Craig was at gym and I was at home doing my stretching and ballet routine. The first hit was very similar to the previous one – slight movement, house creaked – I thought, ok, good, not too bad. Then about four seconds later I heard the second one coming. This time it was stronger than the first hit – a rattler – enough to get me off the floor and the kids to look concerned. Craig said he felt it at the gym, too. Of the other two, the first was the strongest of them all and woke me up, at around 11:30 pm. It was a swayer, and lasted for a while. Yes, I was rocked awake. Strangely, even though it only felt like it was swaying, the shoji were rattling.

In terms of much more pleasant natural phenomena, we had a few outings specifically to view the blossom (hanami, as it is known here) during this period. We made a return visit to Daigoji, as planned, and we walked into town, which takes us along many blossom tree lined roads, and we returned via the Chishakuin cemetery, where there are some lovely trees. The other outings will be covered in the next post.

Near our home

As expected, there were many more people visiting Daigoji, but it was worth going there. The temple grounds are so vast that even though there were hundreds of people, we could still get some photos without people in them, although most of those were taken over their heads (luckily we are relatively tall here, yes, even me). It wasn’t quite peak time, with some trees still to open, but there were plenty that were and it was a beautiful sunny day. Not much more to say really, so here is a selection of the photos:

On the day we walked into town, it was very grey on the way in and it was a little cooler, but it was still a very pleasant walk. There are so many cherry trees planted in and around Kyoto, that you can pretty much walk in any direction and you will find blossom at this time of year. It really is a wonderful thing, which makes any walk into a lovely hanami experience.

To finish this post off, I have an update on our newest family member, Tahlia. After bringing her inside and ensuring she was disease free, we started letting her integrate into the family a bit more, which she was very keen to do (even if the other kids were not quite so keen). At first we let the others go out into the dining room, and Tahlia was a little aloof at first. I would feed her out there, to ensure Ziggy couldn’t steal any of her food (he likes to do that…). As she was pregnant, I changed her diet to a kitten food based diet, as recommended on the internet because kitten food is higher in calories, which a pregnant cat needs.

After about a week, she decided that she should come out into our area – so I would give her breakfast in the dining room, then she would join us after. At night, I would take her food out to the dining room, and she would follow me out there. We didn’t want her to sleep in our area, because even though she was there all day, the other kids were still adjusting to her presence (if you know what I mean).

During this time, Tahlia became increasingly affectionate with us, and she just loved lying on the heated floor at night. Sometimes she would lie right in front of me, so I could rub her belly. Gradually her belly grew, until she looked like a furry football with four legs.

We made a ‘birthing box’ for her, out of a cardboard box. I followed directions from the internet, lining it with plastic, and using cat toilet pads for padding and to capture fluids from birthing and the kittens’ toilet needs. These pads are made to be used either inside litter trays or there are trays especially made where you put the pads on drawers which are under a perforated tray. Tahlia basically ignored the box up until she was nearly two months pregnant. We were worried she would find somewhere else rather less suitable.

One morning I discovered that she had been in the box and had mostly pulled all the linings apart. So, I decided to remove the plastic lining, as it was this that she had really shredded. I kept the padding at the bottom and rearranged the toilet pads, to make them neater. The, on the morning of the 12^th of April, day 64 of her pregnancy, I went out to the dining room to find her in the box, all the layers rearranged by her to form a sort of nest in the corner, and she was panting. I got down to see how she was and at that moment she gave birth to her first kitten! She started cleaning it, and it started squeaking (relief).

After this, over the next few hours, she gave birth to three more bundles of fur. Mother and babies were fine, and the anxious grandmamar (me) was able to relax a little. Having had her babies, she has become much less affectionate, and is now in aggressively protective mummy mode, so we are hassling her as little as possible, and our plans to try to remove the top layer of the toilet pads has completely gone out the window. Our friend who feeds some of the cat colonies, who we helped to move cats and paraphernalia to the house she bought for the cats, has suggested we wait and let Tahlia make the first move in terms of cleaning out the box. This has also taken a weight off our minds. The thing is, all the information on the internet is really aimed at people whose pet cat is having kittens, not one you have recently trapped and brought inside from the streets.

So, we are grandparents 😊, and we are learning. The photos I have of her and the kittens were taken from a distance, and then edited so that more can be seen. I’m not even sure if they all have tails, yet. One thing, none of them look like their mum, that I can see. The father is a ginger and white, fully tailed cat.

That’s all for now. The next post will be “The trees, part deux”.

Cheers!