Country Drive

Just the other day, I was thinking how nice it would be to get into the country and away from all of the concrete. So this morning when I got up, I checked my email and saw a note from Katsumoto inviting me to go plant some potatoes and pick some onions. I immediately wrote back accepting. Then I looked out the window and saw it was raining. The weather actually cleared up pretty quickly. But there was no way I wanted to miss getting out of Nishinomiya for a bit.

Katsumoto rents a couple of square meters of farmland on the other side of Northern Kobe in a town called Miki. It is about an hour drive away. When we arrived Katsumoto dropped Shota, Maho, a friend and me off at the front while he went and parked. Maho took some money and bought a plot to plant some potatoes. When the man taking the money saw me standing behind Maho, he offered to help me, but I indicated that I was with the kids. Then he asked Maho if I was her father. My Japanese is getting much better, but not that good.

He handed Maho a packet of information and pointed to a couple of bins of seed potatoes for her to pick through. Shota picked out sixteen potatoes and then we went and listened to a man instructing about 50 people on how to plant them. When Katsumoto came up, I told him that the man mistook me for her father. He laughed and asked why, since she looks entirely Japanese. He called Shigeko, his wife and told her about me being mistaken for Maho’s father. Shigeko said that I could keep Maho.

I respectfully declined.

At the farm, they had several pairs of rubber boots for people to borrow while working in the fields. Unfortunately, I could find a size 27 for my left foot and a size 26 for my right while I wear 27.5. I had to wear them, though. The fields were quite muddy.

On the way to plant, we stopped
in one of the greenhouses and picked a couple of bags of spinach. The fields were well prepared and marked so people could find the plots they had rented. It took us only 20 minutes or so to plant the potatoes and pick the spinach. We then walked a couple hundred meters to the onion field. On the way there, my size 26 boot made my foot increasingly sore. I walked with a slight limp for a bit.

Luckily, after our farming duties were done, we capped off our trip to the country with a quick soak in a footbath. The aches of my toes were soon forgotten.

It's good to feel the first of March.