Unexpected

I didn't expect to find myself in tears after I wrote this letter. It's just a business letter.

John P. and Judith G. Riordon 

H223

June 28, 2012

Masaki Kojima

Northern Housing Office Co. Ltd.

Dear Masaki-san,

The purpose of this letter is to give 30 days written notice of our moving from H223. We do not yet have orders, but we learned today that we will most likely be leaving Misawa on 29 July 2012. For this reason, we wanted to inform you as soon as possible that we are moving.

Also, there is a family with 5 children arriving to work in John’s office in late July. They may be interested in renting H223. We understand that you cannot hold the house for a particular family, and we will do our best put them or their sponsor in direct contact with you as soon as possible.

Thank you for the past six years of rental in H223. We have been privileged to call this house our home.

Very truly yours,

John P. Riordon                        Judith Gibbons Riordon

June garden

 

I love to garden. Wherever we live, even when we don't own the property, I can't resist playing in the dirt. So when we moved here six years ago and I was given permission by the landlord to make a little garden along the fence line in front of our parking area, I was never so happy. A blank slate of my very own.

Now that we are in our last spring, I want to remember how it looks now that it is filling in and almost finished. (Because gardens are never really completely finished, are they?)

The farthest from the house, this end of the garden is the least developed, but I am very pleased with the way the large purple iris (far left) that we transplanted from the front of the house last fall has bloomed. None of that iris had bloomed in the front of the house since we moved in. It just needed a different home, I guess. The little tree was transplanted from the flowerbed that runs along the east wall of the house. It was taking up too much space and had to be removed. So John dug it out, and I found it a new home by the driveway. It even bloomed this spring with tiny white flowers. And see the little low ferns on the left? We transplanted them from the woods. Aren't they cute?

Katie and Joseph salvaged this yellow iris from the woods down the road. Another gardener in the neighborhood had removed it from his garden and left it there to die. Hooray for new colors of iris!

A quick shot of the front of the house. There is a bare spot now where the large purple iris plants were, to the left of the terra cotta pot, but a perennial chrysanthemum that I put in last fall is coming up there, so it will look fine in another month or so. The little tree and the hosta were here when we moved in, so was the clump of iris in the center back. We have thinned it considerably over the past two years, and it is blooming a lot better now, although not as fully as the plants we moved. The ferns were salvaged from the woods that used to be behind our house. We rescued a lot of plants from there when we realized that they were going to take down all the trees. The vinca was planted by the previous tenants, and is finally spreading enough to count as ground cover and actually help keep the weeds down.

This iris was transplanted from the front of the house in Fall, 2009

Here's what the same clump of iris looked like in Spring, 2010

 I will miss seeing these gardens grow, but I have loved making them, and I love leaving a pretty yard for the next tenants to enjoy. 

"I made myself gardens and parks, and planted in them all kinds of fruit trees."

-Ecclesiastes 2:5

Kyoto Scenes

Lest you think we haven't been doing anything, here's a few scenes from Kyoto...