Then I went to Japan.
And now, by god, I notice cherry blossoms wherever they are.
Thick green leaves rustling in a cool wind is not something I ever focused on per se, though I did notice them occasionally without having a word for what I was seeing. 'Leaves blowing in the wind.' How poetic. But now I see them and think 'Aoarashi' even when, as today, it's not the green leaves of spring blowing in the fresh cool (Aahhhh! cool!!!) wind, but the summer ones. I wonder if there's a kigo (season word) for the green leaves of summer, which on sunny unpolluted days like today are a waving mass of green cloud-like forms. Though n-e Canuck foliage is nothing at all as dense as the Japanese version, nor the west coast one as well, probably. (I was only once in Vancouver proper to see and didn't much care for it: green thought in a **humid grey** green shade, is what it was. Also the reflex sense of those things are too damn big. In Japan they're not too damn big, is the point.)
I do remember the green of Japan Augusts, which is very green against a very blue sky and punctuated by very loud cicadas. Oh- and look! A handy list of season words. And look! "Wind in the verdure (aoarashi, all summer)." So even though the poetic summer is May through July, meaning August isn't (hahaha which is why I always thought the kigo 'lingering heat' so hilarious. Yeah, the lingering heat of August tee-hee) what I'm seeing today is indeed aoarashi.
Of course, I couldn't think about the thing properly until I read about it in a book and was given a word for it. This is what art is to nature, the former beng indispensible for fully appreciating the latter, at least by me. (The Japanese 'art nature', ahh toe neicha, アートネイチャー, is stuff for making people's hair grow back, mostly men's.)
