My Hometown Matsue

My company gives a special five-day-holiday to every employee who have been working for 5, 15, 25, 35 or 45 years.
Since I had been working for 15 years this year, I was entitled to get the holiday.
So, I had a short trip to my hometown Matsue last week.

On A Rainy Day In Matsue City

I have never spent days in Matsue, about 90 minutes from Tokyo by air, in April since almost thirty years ago.

I usualy go back to my hometown Matsue in summer. Flowers in my family’s garden in April were quite diffret from those in summer. In the same way, it’s always sunny and hot in summer, on the contrary, I had both a rainy day and sunny days last time.

Plants and flowers viewing at my family’s home in a rainy day were new to me, so they were very attractive to me.

I took pictures in my family’s garden using a cellphone-built-in camera. I think quality of pictures taken with a cell phone becomes far better than a few years ago.

Don't you think so?



My Summer Holidays End Today

My company CANON offers employees summer holidays from August 8 to August 16 this year. It’s the last day of my holidays today.

I went to my hometown Shimane prefecture on August 10 and stayed 6 days at my mother’s house and came back here in Utsunomiya yesterday.

I enjoyed every minute meeting my 84-year-old mother, my brothers, my sister-in-law and relatives.
My mother living with my brother and sister-in-law has a garden next to her house. My mother loves growing flowers and vegetables in the garden.

When I was living in Shimane, I did not care much about living creatures in the garden.
But now, I live in the 4th flour of a condominium, when I go back to Shimane, looking at those living creatures is always great fun to me.

Veeeeery hot day. Sunflowers look up the sky.

My weeklong trip in western Japan was over. The sunflowers were looking up the sky in the garden of my parent's house in Shimane prefecture.
Flowers, vegetables and insects were almost as vivid as they had been a year ago.

The only difference is my father. He was not there this summer. He had passed away of pneumonia last year.

Even he was bedridden and hardly spoke, I felt comfortable staying beside him and looking him while I was there.

Roads, buildings and even shapes of rivers have changed. The sunflowers don't care the changes growing higher and higher.