This month I have been resurrecting small pieces of memory about Mikio. It never occurred to me to think of these little jigsaw pieces as stories but they are. I remember when he came to visit us in Maryland. It was cold outside. I was nervous about having to cook dinner for someone who owns a hip restaurant. We lived in a tiny house. It had once been the separate summer kitchen for the farmhouse next door where our landlords lived. The night before Mikio came two left hand burners on the electric stove went on the fritz. Given that one burner had never worked that meant we were down to one. I still had to come up with a dinner. Later it turned out that a mouse had electrocuted himself, spread-eagled between the contacts for the burner switches. I put some sweet potatoes in the oven and baked trout in aluminum foil packets filled with the last bits of dill from our garden. We also cobbled together a small salad. Mikio was so impressed by the simplicity of the potatoes it was as if he had never before had sweet potatoes.
The next day we went to the studio three miles down the road to talk pots and review what I had been making. These memories demand accuracy, which is sometimes fleeting. The fibrous nature of smell, the waning light of a short day and the consistency of clay triangulate the specifics of my memories.
Memory demands so much,
it wants every fiber
told and retold.
It gives and gives
but for a price,
–Denise Levertov, from Memory Demands So Much, in This Great Unknowing: Last Poems, New Directions, 1999