On this day, the ninth of the ninth, Japan keeps Kiku no Sekku, Chrysanthemum Day, one of the five seasonal festivals. It traces back to 910, when the imperial court held its first chrysanthemum viewing, and the flower has been bound up with the imperial house ever since.
The part I love is the smallest part. On the eve, people laid pads of cotton wool over the open blossoms and left them out all night to take up the dew. At dawn the damp cotton was pressed to the face — kiku no kisewata, the chrysanthemum's coverlet — for a long life and a young cheek. Others floated petals in sake and drank slowly, which is a very civilized approach to immortality. Court poets wrote about the dew; court physicians presumably wrote about the sake.
The triptych below is not the ninth month by the calendar's strictest reckoning, but it holds the mood: red maple overhead, candles along the veranda, women in patterned kimono, and at the right a woman leaning attentively over an elderly man at his low tray. Long life, attended to by someone. That was always the wish underneath the flowers.
Miriam, the kitchen keeps the ninth month too — kuri gohan, chestnut rice, since chestnuts come in right about now, and the petal sake steeped overnight so it smells faintly bitter and green. Long life tastes of chestnuts and a little rice wine, which seems fair to me.
Miriam, the timing is the plant's own doing: chrysanthemums are short-day flowerers, setting buds as the nights lengthen, so they open when most of the garden has finished. A festival that waits for the light to shorten before it starts.