Happy Sunday! Tina is the host of this week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge and eek, mouse. Ugh, I still have trauma from having dealt with multiple mice who invaded my garden sanctuary. Fortunately, this week’s topic isn’t about mice. It’s about home, where the heart lies.

I store my photos on a cloud and each day, a notification would pop up to remind me of the photos from years past. Yesterday, as I was reading Tina, I saw the notification and opened up the app to see a slideshow of my time in Kyoto, Japan. It was September 20, 2023 when I was in Kyoto and it was part of the 2 weeks trip in Japan.

I remember before I went, my mom promised I would love Japan and its big cities but it was quite the opposite. When I landed in the US, I could’ve kissed the ground. I wasn’t at all in love with the cities in Japan. My favorite part about Japan was probably when we went to see Mount Fuji and stayed in the small resort town of Kawaguchiko. The town was quiet and not as crowded as the city.

I spent the first decade of my life in a suburban city (at least, it used to be suburban) of Zhongshan in Guangdong province in China. When I immigrated to the U.S., I lived 4 years in the suburbs of east LA before moving to the suburbs on the border of Austin and Round Rock, stayed there for 18 months before moving to the suburb of Salt Lake City, and that was all before I moved to my current place, which is 30 miles from the nearest city. So I guess you can say I’m a country mouse and probably always will be.

Though I’m 30 miles from the nearest city, I wouldn’t call where I live country. It’s probably suburb at best but with more and more people being employed by the air force base, the so-called suburban city is slowly transforming into a city. Still, it’s nowhere like Tokyo or even Salt Lake City.

There’s a park within walking distance and I always enjoy watching the laps with watching whatever would go on in the field in the middle of the park. Sometimes, there would be soccer matches and sometimes, it’s just pet owners playing frisbees with their dogs.

Lastly and I know this may strange but I often feel my heart lies in the garden. At the end of a road trip or a period away, there’s nowhere I want to be more than my garden, no matter the season.