We are excited to finally be able to enjoy hot summer nights! Having dinners outside in Hideto's grandma's ZEN garden, which is now, since she stopped tending it about 115 years ago, a quaint Japanese area with amazing trees. Hideto said when he was growing up, their neighbor had even more of these trees and he used to run around the two yards and find Japanese insects, but then the property was sold, and now there is a hotel there! It was supposed to be a "real hotel" but now it's a "love hotel." But, this garden....in it are relics of the Tadenuma past here, a sesame grinder, a pickles "container" - both made of heavy cement and used two hundred years ago...Hideto started thinking about how to make it "people friendly" and we set up our table and lawn chairs next to the gigantic boulders that somehow his grandparents or great grandparents managed to have moved here....these are not common, I've never seen them anywhere else. There were rocks placed as a walk way and Hideto moved those so Noi could run around without tripping and when he lifted them, underneath were Ant Cities! Noi was loving it! She learned how well ants work together to move their babies to safety and how they worked together to accomplish their tasks. This was my first time to see so many ants together like this too.
