Friday Field Notes--Summer is Vorbei

  The cicadas are gone; there remains naught but decaying corpses, and the occasional unnoticed empty pupal skin, still clinging to the back of a leaf , not having made it's way into anybody's pocket during the summer.  Their loud "Mi--mi-mi-miiiiii" that makes you feel hotter just to hear it, is silent, replaced now by the cool evening song of the crickets.

The last defiant morning glories creep up netting draped over a second story window....

 ...while another twists its way up the first purple aster of fall, which is itself an intruder in the carefully planted border along the road.  A seed blown over by the wind, or dropped, maybe, by a bird.  Nevertheless, a welcome, familiar sight--asters grew all over the Field at the end of the road I grew up on.


The pink morning glories are still blooming fitfully all along the fence here, and but for the incongruous splash of pink blaring out from the middle, a passer-by wouldn't know the aster was under attack.

 The spiders have appeared, seemingly from nowhere, suspended in midair between branches and wires and buildings. (more about them later...:))

At the temple where I pick up the keys to the nearby community center, the Higanbana are up, bereft of leaves, which came up and died back last June.  These are white, but more often they're brilliant red.  This is Lycoris Radiata, probably a native of China imported to Japan.  In English it goes variously by Surprise Lily, Resurrection Lily, Magic Lily, or Naked Ladies, although those are actually Lycoris Squamigera, a related species lacking the lovely spidery stamens  that surround Higanbana like the afterglow of fireworks.

 
The Japanese name is "Equinox Flower" since it blooms very nearly right on the equinox.  As they say, "Atsusa mo, samusa mo Higan made!"--neither heat nor cold lasts beyond the equinox.  Which was just last week, and it has cooled off considerably, so score one for the old saws:))  It's a flower people expect to see in the fall--in fields, on hillsides, along roads, in gardens.  Children draw pictures of it at school; grandmas do watercolors of it on postcards.

And though the Itchou (Ginko) trees are green yet for a while, the edible nuts are already clustering.  Those Ginan (ginko nuts) look cute now, but come November when they are all over the ground in the park up the road--mercy, the smell is almost overpowering.  Fortunately all the Obaasans (grandmas) around here like to collect them to cook into Chawanmushi (savory steamed egg custard).  Given the smell in the park, I haven't been able to bring myself to eat them yet...
And that butterfly up there?  You have no idea how long I chased him today waiting for him to sit still.  He was *supposed* to sit drinking nectar from the vine I always see him on (the subject of next week's field notes), but today, apparently, the ginko tree was the place to be.

Mata asobou, ne!