I started off the year with a ankle-foot swelled like a bag of mouldy oranges, or a club foot, or like a pygmy head, anything except a normal looking foot and a standardly lumpy ankle. It was alarming. More alarming that I didn't exactly know why.
So Yokohama hospital gave me lots of pills, Yosuke's mum had the good grace to change my bandages and feed me all kinds of wonderful and unidentifiable and wonderfully unidentifiable foods during the stay down there, and then Yamagata hospital gave me even more pills. In between I dreamt some very strange things (I think the pills were the culprit).
Yosuke's mum told me that the dream you dream on the second of the first month foretells the fortunes of your year. I lost my job, was in general disgrace and could feel my cheeks burning red even as I woke up. I don't precisely recall if this dream was dreamt on first second or third ( I blame the pills), but that doesn't matter: around about the time it's bad to have a bad dream, I had a bad dream. Ito-sensei, whom I sit next to in the staff room at school, was the one disgusted with me in the dream.
Today I was invited to Ito-sensei's house for New Year's food.
The wind and the rain rasped window panes and the snow still hid above the clouds. Out of sight but settled in all our minds and scattered all about conversations in the Yama-G-Shi. (That was me setting the scene)(Get used to it).
We made hand-made mochi (new year's food). Tomoko, Kasuya-sensei, me took turns walloping a wooden mallett down on a wet flop of rice-mulch all pounded up into a sticky pulp. Ito-sensei's husband wet hands and folded over rice-mulch in between mallett blows. We all took turns. Kasuya-sensei has rhythm. Ito-sensei took pictures.
I'd forgotten I fancied Tomoko. Lots. She made eating a satsuma as titillating as that giant prawn last slouchy August at their bbq. Today she had a cold. She turned away and blew her nose and my heart up my throat all at once. Imagine!
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