Ode to a rice field

Once upon a time, a girl from America moved to Japan. She was taken from the sprawling suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona and plopped down into the not quite as immense suburbs of Kurume. One major difference between these two places (okay, so there are many differences. Most notably the size of the cars, the language spoken and on street signs, the relative humidity...but I digress) was the greenery. In Arizona, the girl was used to more brown than green, and had to live with the gray-green of the cacti and the often dried out brownish-green of the palm trees. But Kurume has introduced the brave heroine's rods and cones to a whole new category of green---the green of a rice field.

Cheesy, I know. But the rice fields in Kurume (and the other parts of Japan I have seen) are really quite lovely and very, very green in a bright way that a forest could never be. When I bike to my junior high school I have the privilege of biking through some of them (then on a busy road, through more rice and then along and even busier road. You can probably guess which part of the ride I like better) and I must say the late afternoon sun on green rice stalks makes them glow. It's also really cool to ride past after they've been watered and you can see the reflection of the rice in the standing water along the edges of the paddy. So with my appreciation of this albeit not-so natural but nevertheless lovely scenery, I was taken aback on the afternoon I was riding home and there was a tractor out in one of the fields! Nooooooooooo! The paddies the tractor had already gotten to were nothing but brown stubble filled with pigeons eating the leftovers--ewww. So sad.

I must take some pictures I said to myself. As luck would have it, the next few days were busy, then it rained, and when it finally was dry enough to take out the camera, the sun still wasn't shining bright enough for me to capture the color that I really love, but I knew if I waited any longer, all I would have pictures of would be brown stubble.

Rice!

Green vs. brown. Which would you rather pass by every morning?

This one is for you Mom! What kind of bird is it? It had yellow feet.

Even for brown stalks, these bundles are kind of cute and make it look like fall (even if the temperature still says its summer)

Then, less than a week after I scrambled to take these photos, some of the fields are growing back again. Add the harvest cycle of rice to the long list of things I know nothing about.