How to Stop Time
On a driving holiday with your mother around Hokkaido in autumn
Your mother is hugging a cabbage twice the size of a human head to her chest, and comments multiple times how cheap and big the onions piled at every rest-stop shop are. She’s like a kid at a dog adoption drive. Tell her to buy the onions, even though she is too sensible and probably won’t.
Late September is harvest season. The onions are exceptionally abundant this year, with less hot days and the right amount of rain. They show up in generous handfuls on pizza slices that the two of you split at a cheese factory, layered on fat and juicy mackerel sandwiches that you have at a café. Everywhere you drive, you see onions being pulled up from fields, crates upon crates of them piled on top of each other. Take a picture of the crates and send them to your mother, as per her request, of the souvenir she was unable to bring home.
Pumpkins are in season, too, as are sweet potato, chestnuts, rice and corn. Buy a vegetarian bento box from a café a family runs out of their home in a residential area between stops. Eat the meal at the next rest stop in an outdoor pavilion, where your meat-loving mother polishes it off with relish, and point out the scents of pine announcing itself. The rest stop has a famous bear-shaped pancake stand, made of flour from soy beans from a local tofu factory and filled with variants of fresh cream and red bean paste. Share four of them. Take a picture of your mother with her mouth full.
Wait for the soba farm and restaurant that your guesthouse host told you about to open by dawdling at the unnamed beach nearby. Watch the fishermen with their multiple fishing rods propped on the sand, jutting into the sky, while fat seagulls prowl around them. Salmon is in season as well, returning from the ocean to the cold Hokkaido rivers where they were born.
Your mother’s seventy-three year old body struggles to get up from low-lying Japanese furniture or lack thereof, and slopes and long distance walking get the better of her - even with her smooth skin and able hands. Nag her about getting more strength training for the twentieth time. Take some easy walks with her, and some on your own. Let your shoes get muddy with the wet soil, and squelch through soggy ginkgo and Japanese maple leaves littering hill paths and damp city streets.
When your mother tells you the same story yet again, and you’re not sure if it’s because she forgot she told you last week, or genuinely believes it deserves a re-telling - for once, let her.