Harvesting Memories

By the slow, strolling days of late July, the first cucumbers are ready for harvest. They are not the long, thin variety my father expected, nothing like the pictures on the seed package. While crispy and tasty, their large seeds and subtle difference in taste make them unsuitable for pickling and freezing, my mother says.

The garden is flourishing as I arrive home for my second visit to my parents’ home in Fort Collins, Colo. Tomatoes are ripening, and my mother, Amy Noriyuki, is pinching string beans off the stems and placing them in an old pot. When it is full, she walks up on the deck, sits at the table and, one by one, snaps the ends off them in preparation for dinner.

She is tired. Her fatigue is evident even in her voice, but it is more than that. There is a heaviness that seems to bear hard upon her laughter, and that is what concerns me most. I have never seen her this way.

Both her parents died of strokes. When I ask about what happened to her a month earlier, not long after my last trip home, she doesn’t like to use the word.

“It was nothing,” she says.

“Was it a stroke?” I ask.

“It was nothing.”

“Did the doctor call it a stroke?”

“I suppose.”

New medications are causing her blood pressure to dip and rise to extremes. When I urge her to see a doctor, she refuses.

“He’s on vacation,” she says.

“Someone will be seeing his patients,” I reply.

“I’m OK.”

My mother’s strength is different than my father’s. His is flint and silence, hers is resilience. It allows her to laugh each day no matter what, to say what is on her mind, to softly hum Japanese melodies when there are problems or heavy silence in the house.

She has endured a lot. Her family was living in Northern California when World War II began, and they were forced into an internment camp in southern Colorado.

Two years later, they were released when family friends living in Colorado agreed to sponsor them. In 1943, she met my father, Samuel Noriyuki, through a mutual friend, and in 1944 they were married. The war was still going on, and they had to be cautious. They couldn’t have a big wedding, they say, because people got suspicious whenever there was a large gathering of Japanese Americans.

So Mom and Dad exchanged vows in a tiny shack, which my father bought for $75. It had been used as a vegetable stand before it became their first home. With the help of friends, he loaded it on a truck and transported it to the 68-acre farm my grandfather bought for $7,000 near La Salle, Colo. That house still stands next to a tall cottonwood tree and is used for storage.

My mother has worked hard throughout her life, but I don’t remember ever hearing her complain. She worked in the fields, but to give the family a steady cash income she eventually found work in town as a dishwasher and a cashier. After attending school, she worked 18 years as a licensed practical nurse at Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins. Some of her former patients still write to her.

One of my vivid childhood memories is watching her dance at obon odori, a Japanese celebration honoring ancestors. She would dress in a kimono and dance gracefully in the warm night. It was the first time I thought of her as beautiful.

When I think of home, I do not think of one specific place. Home is people and memories and tastes and sounds. It is a cloud land. It is the moment when I’m holding my 18-month-old daughter as we talk to the moon, the smell of my mother’s cooking on New Year’s Day, seeing my wife hug a book she loves after turning the final page. It is California and Colorado, past and present.

And, sometimes now, when my parents’ house is quiet and my mother is tending her orchids, which flourish under her care, I listen for her, hoping to hear her softly hum. That, too, is the sound of home.

Buying Their First Home

Before it became my father’s garden, this land was planted in grain by a family named Brown. The Overland Trail is less than a mile away, and until development began, there were places where you could still see wagon-wheel ruts from the 1800s.

My parents were among the first to buy a house in Fort Collins, moving in in 1973. By selling his equipment and a harvest of beans still in storage, my father was able to clear his sizable farming debt and have enough left for a small down payment on the house. The first year, he grew corn in the backyard.

There are two cherry trees in back, born of seeds spit from our mouths. They now stand some 15 feet high. There is a bonsai tree at least 75 years old, a Japanese maple that struggles and a ginkgo tree, rare for Colorado.

Now, and for as long as they can, my parents want to stay in this house, but my father says there may come a time when they move to a condo or apartment like many of their friends. That’s what I’m thinking one afternoon, when he asks me, “You haven’t seen our future home, have you?”

We climb in the car and drive to a cemetery, where my parents show me where their ashes will be kept. The solemn structure contains niches, sort of like fancy lockers. Theirs overlook the mountains.

One man already is in his. Below his name are the words: “Let’s go fishing.” My father says that, perhaps, on his he will have the words inscribed, “OK, let’s go.”

Fishing was about the only family activity we did while farming. On mornings when I awakened to the sound of raindrops hitting the window, I knew the fields would be too wet for work and we would head to the mountains.

“It took my mind off everything,” my father says. “I really got a kick out of watching you kids catch something. It didn’t matter to me whether I caught anything or not.”

My brother, sister and I fished with dull, old rods and reels, but it didn’t matter. “The fish can’t tell the difference,” my father would say. I remember his pole, though. It was shiny and new, and when he cast his line out into the lake, the reel sounded a steady whir, leading to a distant, pleasing “plunk,” without the clinks and clanks of my gear.

We never did fly fish, which is for showoffs. We fished with bait, and for lunch we ate bento (box lunches) that my mother prepared. I realize now that my love of mountains came from them, so I am pleased by the view from their future home.

Memories of Playing Baseball

Almost every night during my visits we sit downstairs to watch “the baseball.” My parents have become Colorado Rockies fans, and they either watch games on television or listen on radio.

The volume is turned up because my father is hard of hearing, but there are times when he mutes it, and this is when we have some of our best discussions.

We are watching a game against the Houston Astros when he tells me about how he played baseball in a Japanese American league on various teams in northern Colorado. It was one of the few opportunities to escape the rigors of farming, he says.

The Sunday games would draw big crowds. Parents would cheer them on and it was not unusual for the spectators to take their loyalties to the extreme.

Fights would break out in the stands, and one time Mr. Murata came out onto the field with a bat and took after a player on the opposing team. He swung and missed, clobbering my Uncle Gram Noriyuki in the head. The next day he came by to apologize. I ask my father if he was ever involved.

“No,” he says, “but some dirty bastard came from behind and busted me, popped me in the eye. I was up to bat, and for some damn reason he came at me.”

A baseball bat, a glove and a Boy Scout manual bought at a fire sale are the only childhood possessions he remembers. When he started Japanese school to learn the language and culture, he would go outside and play with bricks, pretending they were cars.

He has always been fascinated by cars. When he tries to put together the years and events in his life, it helps him to remember what car he was driving at the time.

He was behind the wheel when he was 13, not uncommon for children growing up on farms at that time, and one of my favorite stories about him is told by my Uncle Gram of Gardena, who describes how Dad was driving them all to school one day when a troublemaker showed up. He stood in the road calling them “dirty Japs.” My dad told him to get out of the way or risk the consequences.

“I dare you to run over me,” the boy said.

My father shifted into gear and gunned it.

“Those old cars were built pretty high off the ground,” my uncle explains, “so he didn’t get hurt too bad.”

These stories reveal a side of my father I never knew existed. My Aunt Mary Okino in Ohio describes him as a “pretty ornery” kid in his youth.

When I ask him about this during the Rockies’ game, my mother looks up from her crocheting and nods her head in agreement.

“I don’t think I was that ornery,” Dad says.

My mother looks at him, then at me, then back down at the blanket she is making.

By the late innings, both of them start to tire. The Rockies are losing miserably. My dad is covering one eye then the other, trying to analyze his failing vision. Ever since cataract surgery earlier this year, he has been having trouble.

My mother says she had better check her blood pressure because it’s starting to feel like it’s going up.

“We’re a mess,” she says quietly to no one. She takes one last look at the game. “Dame, dame,” (dah meh, dah meh) she says sternly at the Rockies. It’s Japanese for “no good, no good.” She walks slower than usual up the stairs. My father’s eyes seem worried.

“I didn’t think Mom would have problems, the way she was going,” he says. “She’s sort of slowed down. Maybe after the weather straightens out, we can go fishing. That might help.”

Work harder, go fishing--my father’s way of addressing life’s obstacles. I have thought about that a lot, and I’m beginning to understand the wisdom in his thinking as well as my love for mountains and deep pools that swirl in shadows of rivers--and the sound of early morning raindrops against my window.

Before heading back to California at the end of my visit, he presents me with a gift, his old fishing pole, the one I remember from childhood. The cork handle is smooth and worn, the rod still shiny and in good repair. It now hangs in my office, and I study it often.

I feel comfort in knowing it is there, and someday when he is gone and I miss him, I will remember his wisdom, take the pole off the wall and go fishing. It will take me home.

Duane Noriyuki can be reached by e-mail at socalliving@latimes.com.