Monday May 21, 1990
My favorite house in all of Kamegawa is gone. They tore it down this week. It was the abandoned house next door. I don't have much of a view from our second-storey balcony, but in the mornings, I liked to stand there, sipping my coffee, staring at the lines of the old tile roof.
Once I sneaked into the house and photographed it. The sliding doors in the back opened up onto a typical Japanese garden complete with pool, stone lantern, and cherry tree. I came home to the sound of terrible ripping and tearing. "What is that?" JQS answered, "You'd better not look." I did, though, and then cried and cried.
Today, with help of one of my first-year students, Naomi, I rescued one of the roof's corner tiles (the one in the lower right corner of the photo left) and three large water jugs. If only Naomi and I had gotten there earlier, we might have been able to save some of the carved transoms. You would have cried, too, if you had seen the massive timbers that were the crossbeams of the house, clawed down by the wrecking machine. For three days, we endured the splintering, crunching, grinding sounds of my favorite house in Kamegawa being reduced to nothingness.
Posted by M Sinclair Stevens
May 21, 1990
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