With summer approaching like the rising sun on the black interior of a small car, we are trying to get in as many pleasant spring walks as we can. Not only are we doing our best to enjoy the weather, but the neighborhood itself. Everything is so different, so beautiful, so Japanese. I know that is stating the obvious, but it is those obvious things, those small truths of each day that we will miss, especially if we don't realize they were there until we are gone. I want to appreciate the way a sculpted pine defies gravity as at balances in a protective arc over a sliding gate that opens to a small garden crowded with tiny bushes pruned to perfection by an old man so bent with age that he only stands erect if he's sitting down. I want to feel the unobtrusive closeness of the houses that line the narrow streets in our neighborhood and remember how their closeness never felt cramped, only familiar, intimate, and cooperative. I want to breath the smells that are sucked from the kitchens of little Japanese women by small pull string fans mounted to the walls above their efficient propane stoves--the curry, the shoyu, the oil, the fish, mingled with propane exhaust, ascending into the sky above our home where the setting sun glows like a nightly retiring of the flag. In forty days we'll be on a plane, and all this will be a memory we will see, taste, and smell for the rest of our lives, but only if we take the time to live it now.