Our free day in Nara started for me at 4 AM.  As dawn turned the dark into fog I dug out a plastic bag for the camera and the 500-yen umbrella I bought the other day in Osaka. 

I dodged early morning traffic and climbed up the hilly retail streets towards the Temples near Nara Park.  Rain spit and the wind blew.  Still, it was warmer than the snowy night in 2003 when I stood, the tallest person in a crowd of Japanese, watching a Shinto rites of spring ceremony that is over 1200 years old.

At the park I began to see Nara deer.  Smaller than whitetail deer, but bigger than Key deer, they are tamer than house cats and expert beggars.  One adorable doe-eyed critter came right up to me.  I melted and dug in my pack for a treat for him and while I did he bit me in the butt.  Hard. Black and blue hard.  I’m serious, if you’re in Nara watch out for these fiends.

Overcast and bitten, I approached the Todoiji Temple.  In an outer compound a priest swept a path methodically.  We made eye contact. We smiled and exchanged Japanese “good mornings” and suddenly we both giggled.  During our tiny connection the sun broke through the clouds and shone like a light turned on in a dark room.  Delighted, we both flung our arms up to the sun together and laughed more. 

When I got into the temple I couldn’t stop weeping.  The Great Buddha inside the largest wooden structure in the world is overwhelming.  I could blame it on the incense, or thinking of loved ones, but I wasn’t alone. 

Later I took a path into the woods above the highest temple in the compound and found myself huffing and puffing up a path to a mountaintop.  Never one to pass a view from above, I kept climbing.  I met an old woman on her way down with a plastic bag full of fiddleheads.  It reminded me of rafting days in Maine with my old friend Sue V when we used to gather chanterelles mushrooms and fiddleheads for quiches breakfasts.  This Japanese woman told me the greens are good for you and offered some to me.  I pretended to eat some raw and she laughed and grabbed them away.

Once I got up high enough I was able to breath again.  The city below was a distant din drown out by spring run off streams, song birds, and insects.  I was also far enough away from the temples where I could pocket a little rock or two without feeling like I’m taking a treasure from Japanese history. 

On my mud surfing ride down the mountain I found a complete deer skeleton and a rock cairn that I didn’t see on the way up.  And so it goes.