“I’m sorry.” Yuko’s apology left Soeda unable to speak for a moment,
and Yuko continued. “I’ve walked the path twice today. I was looking for
the purse this afternoon, so I was looking down the whole time. This
evening I was looking up the whole time, and I even saw the moon.”
Soeda chuckled.
“I remember thinking this afternoon that a lot of leaves had fallen, but
somehow I never noticed that the branches over my head were bare.”
“I wonder if this sort of thing has happened before. Do you think the
trees at the bottom of the path always lose their leaves first?” said Soeda,
but Ikuko’s only reply was to sigh and cock her head.
They had lived for years right next to the row of ginkgo trees, but none
of them could remember if it was like this every autumn.
“There must be something wrong with us,” Soeda muttered.
“We’ll have to make sure to pay more attention next year,” Ikuko said.
Then, remembering that her daughter would no longer be at home when the
autumn of that next year came, she was overcome with loneliness. “Why
don’t we send a letter to Shinichi in Kyoto? He hikes and he’s interested in
plants and so on—I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d noticed.”
“Maybe I’ll take some pictures of the trees tomorrow and send them to
him,” Yuko said.
The next morning Ikuko walked with Soeda down to the bottom of the
path so she could get a better look at the row of trees. Yuko came out after
them. Every so often she would run on ahead of them, stopping to take a
picture of the row of trees and of her parents standing before it. The whole
thing turned into quite an event.
Three days later, late at night, a fierce winter wind blew up. December
had begun. Soeda and Ikuko lay in bed listening to the sounds of the wind,
