Friday, peeping out the office window, I spied flakes floating gently down but they melted into rain by the time they reached the earth.

Instead of the series of dry cloudless bleak winter days, it is now a misty wet world.  The top of the nearest skyscraper is shrouded in fog.

It occurs to me I have lived in Tokyo exactly one year.

Today I let a friend cut my hair.  As she chatted away I noticed it piling up on the kitchen floor but I didn’t say anything.  The result is rather interesting; skillful certainly, I suppose.  There are all these short bits around my face.  But it is satisfying to be unburdened of something even if it is only keratin and split ends.  When I was four year old, the day before school pictures were taken, I reached up and grabbed a handful of hair above my forehead and absentmindedly snipped it off.  My mother was horrified; it was the wrong era for Mamie Eisenhower bangs.

In my class picture that year, I am on the extreme top left, being the tallest girl.  Everyone else smiles with the blank cheerfulness of kindergarteners; my eyes are closed and my mouth is open as if singing or shouting out a phrase.  This seems so out of character to me now; why would I ever be the only one talking?  This former self is another person entirely, a person free with scissors and library paste and self-expression.  In truth, I did not like my kindergarten teacher.  The first day of school I came home and informed my mother I could do the teacher’s job and perhaps indeed she felt her instruction methods challenged by my four-year-old self.  Thinking herself clever she gave me an annoying epithet that rhymed with a variant of my first name; I despised her.  I noted with satisfaction that she dressed like a witch for Halloween—it went well with her nasty smile and ugly witchy nose.

As her last revenge she insisted on holding me back a year but my mother refused to allow it, stating that I was simply bored in her class (and I was—I could read before I went to school).  Coloring endless worksheets of the alphabet and taking naps WAS boring.

I look her up online and find she has thankfully retired, but not before spending a long career as a pre-K teacher.  Ugh.