Mountain Journal — On the Green Meadow
This morning’s brunch was a sort of salad bibimbap made with lettuce and perilla leaves from our garden beds, a few vegetables wife had picked up at the farmers’ market, and a little leftover rice from yesterday.
For the dressing, she mixed gochujang with olive oil instead of sesame oil.
There was, in fact, so much salad and so little rice that I barely noticed the rice was there. So I wasn’t quite sure whether to call what she had made a seasoned dish or a salad with gochujang dressing.
But then again, as the Korean saying goes, when you catch a pheasant, you call it a chicken. In other words, why quibble over names? If it tastes good, that’s what matters.
The vegetables were grown without pesticides, nurtured only by sunlight, water, and wind. They were so fresh and wholesome that they almost seemed cute.
As I ate, I had the strange feeling that their freshness was entering my body through my mouth, bringing even me back to life in shades of green.
And when I looked out the window, the green of the mountains and trees seemed to enter through my eyes and travel deep into my body.
It was almost as if that green light were flowing through every tiny blood vessel.
Every now and then, I found myself imagining that I had become a green tree.
Starting today, I have decided to practice golf while walking barefoot across the grass in our yard.
My golf game is so poor that I feel embarrassed even calling myself a beginner. I have not yet reached a level at which I can reasonably be assigned a rank.
Still, I figured that walking across the grass and picking up golf balls would at least give me a little exercise.
Perhaps sensing where my ambitions were headed, friends who recently visited us took pity on me and “donated” a supply of golf balls.
The clubs came from my father-in-law, who happened to have a few extras.
Of course, walking barefoot through the grass around here requires a little caution.
Ticks can carry Lyme disease.
Deer occasionally wander through the broad lawn near our deck, but I have hardly seen any signs of animals in the grass near the front entrance.
So that is where I have decided to begin my barefoot walks.
Afterward, I can simply wash my feet thoroughly and inspect them carefully.
There is no reason to give up everything simply because there is some risk involved.
As we say in Korea, you don’t stop making kimchi just because you’re afraid of maggots.
Yesterday, my wife made beet juice.
She added two strawberries that had ripened in a pot, along with a few wild strawberries she had picked near the entrance to the driveway.
There wasn’t a grain of sugar in it, yet the pure, unadulterated flavor tasted sweet.
Before long, my wife will make tea from the mint she picked on her morning walk and bring it out to me.
A cup of mint tea, its fragrance deep and clean, while Tchaikovsky and Dvořák’s serenades for strings play in the background.
Could there be a sweeter morning?
In so many ways, I feel that moving here to the mountains has been a blessing.
When I was a child, there was a song that seemed to pour out of the radio so often that it practically owned the airwaves. It was a song by the Korean singer Nam Jin called “On the Green Meadow.”
I will build a picture-perfect house
On that green meadow,
And live there for a hundred years
With the one I love.In spring, we will sow the seeds;
In summer, the flowers will bloom.
In autumn, there will be a plentiful harvest;
And in winter, we will be happy.
After singing about the tall buildings of the city and the freedom to live according to whatever fashion happens to be in style, the song continues:
Even a thatched cottage lit by fireflies—
If I am with you,
I like it. I like it.
If I am with you.
And when I look at our home, I realize that, compared with our house in the city, we really are surrounded by a wide green meadow.
It is not the kind of lawn that has been carefully manicured into submission.
Here, one kind of grass grows alongside another. Nameless weeds mingle with wildflowers. The landscape is a little unruly, perhaps, but it is a healthy green world, free from the harmful effects of herbicides.
We eat the greens that have sprouted from seeds we planted ourselves.
We watch the flowers that seem to bloom endlessly all around us.
And so perhaps my wife and I are, in our own small way, the very people that old song once imagined living on the green meadow.
Then, around the end of June, the fireflies arrive.
Night after night, they burst into the darkness like tiny fireworks, scattering their light across the fields.
We may not have the thatched cottage lit by fireflies from the song.
But we have the fireflies.
We have the green meadow.
And we have each other.
And perhaps that is why, after all these years, I finally understand.
Maybe we have been quietly living, day after day, inside the song that once drifted through the radio so long ago.
