My Year of Dirt and Water

by Tracy Franz

  I pick up another stone, pull back my hand, and then stop. I lower my arm and inspect the object in my open palm. Ordinary, jagged, dirt-streaked granite. Flecks of gray, black, white. I tuck it into my pocket, give the water one last look before moving on. At the neighborhood statue of Jizo, I place my stone neatly, with two hands, and then bow and gassho.

  Ikasu.

  FEBRUARY

  Beginnings

  Tuesday, February 1

  While drying one of my favorite tea cups this morning, I fumble and the cup flies free of wet hands and towel—shooting out neatly in an upward trajectory, pausing (it seems) in mid-air, and then completing the arc. The sound as it hits the floor is slight but decisive—a body exploding outward from the point of impact. For a few brief seconds, I believe I can preserve the cup by simply willing myself to get a better grip, to make a less aggressive pull with the towel. A course correction in the past tense. But this fallacy is quickly eclipsed by the forward motion of cause-effect logic. I cannot undo what has already been done, or not done. There is only this moment and then this moment and then this moment and then . . . this moment. Well, I think, at least now I’m paying attention.

  The sky is brilliant blue and cloudless as I walk to work. It is almost an Alaskan sky, but absent that line of towering mountains. A fragment of thought arises as I walk, sharp as the edge of a favorite broken cup. It was in 2000, the summer Koun traveled to Alaska with me, to see the place where I came of age. The great adventure of that trip had been driving to Denali National Park, to visit the largest mountain in North America. We spent three days in a rustic log cabin with a reportedly fabulous view of Denali, “The Great One.” Except there was no mountain—only an unyielding blanket of clouds. In the hotel gift shop, we bought postcards of a hypothetical view—a vision that I held only in distant childhood memory. Then, miles outside of the park as we drove back to Anchorage, the cloud cover lifted, burning away into blue sky, and a towering mountain appeared as if by magic, from nowhere. We pulled the car over and just stood, in awe. It had been there all along.

  Thursday, February 3

  It is an entrance exam day at our little university, and all regular classes have been canceled. After the completion of the assessments, the teachers disappear into their offices to huddle beneath the asthmatic groans of aging heaters while they mark student work or pore through books or compose research papers that matter. I pace the long unheated hallways, feeling unusually impervious to the cold. My breath is visible—a thin vapor ghost on every exhale—and my thoughts turn again and again to a flowering kaleidoscope of experience that opens out and out and out. The same pieces rearranging, juxtaposing themselves in new but still familiar ways. As I turn a corner in the hall near my office, I bump into Yukari and Sanae, the ever-genki ESS girls.

  “Bikkuri shimashita! You surprised!” shouts Sanae, usually the less boisterous of this pair of friends.

  “Are you okay, Tracy-sensei? You are looking a little . . . lost?” adds Yukari.

  “Oh, I was just thinking.”

  “What thinking?”

  “I was thinking about my very first weeks in Japan. About a lot of things.”

  “What was first impression?”

  “Of Japan? That it is very different, very foreign.”

  “And now?”

  I smile at the girls and consider the question. Puffs of breath rise from each of us. “I know that I still don’t understand much, but this place is becoming a part of me. It’s my home. One of my homes. I feel very lucky to know you all. Very lucky.”

  “I see. It’s ichi-go ichi-e. Do you remember?”

  “I remember.”

  “Oh! Tracy-sensei, do you know Setsubun? It is today. We want to show you.”

  “Setsubun? It’s something to do with getting rid of evil spirits, right?”

  “Yes, yes. Come with us to ESS room!” I follow the pair downstairs and along the corridor to the English club room, where the necessary items have been placed out on the table: a bowl full of beans, a bright red mask with fierce features.

  “First, you must take hard soybean for your age.” Yukari lifts the bowl and passes it to me. I count out 31 to their 21. “Eat for happiness, for this New Year.” We pop handfuls of beans into our mouths, chewing with an air of thoughtfulness.

  “Okay, now janken for the oni.”

  “What?”

  “Do rock-paper-scissors now. We will take turns being the devil.” We each hold out our hands, call out the necessary syllables to play the game.

  “Ah—I am loser!” says Yukari. She grabs the red mask and pulls it over her face. “Now, I will go to building’s door and you will chase me and throw beans.”

  Sanae adds, “And must shout, oni wa soto fuku wa uchi! Can you say it, Sensei?”

  “Oni wa . . . ?”

  “It is ‘bad luck out, good luck in!’” Explains Sanae as Yukari slips out the door.

  I look doubtfully at the small, hard beans in my hand. “Wait—how do you say it again?”

  “I am oni now!” shouts Yukari, her voice echoing from the other side of the building. “Chase!”

  Sanae and I hurry after her, down the empty hall and out the door, and then we are racing across the campus grounds, shouting and hurling beans and laughing, like children held together in a moment.

  Friday, February 4

  Snow is falling outside this morning, a thin blanket of white settling over everything. Students form tiny snowmen along the campus walkway to my building—miniature sentries guarding a fortress of knowledge. By noon, when the sun is at its highest, surely the snowmen will cease to be, leaving nothing behind but twigs and pebbles and a brief, damp memory.

  After work, Yoko-san picks me up. Her youngest granddaughter, the five-year-old Ha-chan, sits in the backseat and clutches sweetly at a pink egg-shaped virtual pet. Twenty minutes later, we arrive at Hotel Castle, to a shodo calligraphy exhibition. “This is very fine work,” explains Yoko-san as we enter the large gallery, its walls lined with scrolls of varying sizes. Many people move around us. Still, there is a reverent feeling to the room, a monastic air. Ha-chan—the virtual pet now on her wrist—moves silently between us, taking turns holding our hands as we walk through handwriting.

  “What do you think?” asks Yoko-san, as we complete the loop.

  “I don’t understand anything. But I also can’t look away.”

  “Oh. Then you understand.”

  Tuesday, February 8

  Finally, it is our first day back to pottery practice after a too-long break. I feel the weight of Yoko-san’s absence from our group. We all do. After the necessary pleasantries, we settle into our seats and begin opening our toolboxes. Each of us finds a wood kote inside, signed by Yoko-san. Enjoy your pottery life! reads mine. That elegant script of a master calligrapher.

  “What a lonely sight . . .” sighs Baba-san, placing her new kote squarely in front of her work station.

  “Oh! Look who’s here. Yuko-san and baby!” says Sensei, leaping up and sliding open the glass door. Yuko-san, glowing with that ever-present warmth and a chubby new baby boy clutched to her chest, enters the workshop, into our outstretched arms. Women who create with nothing more than dirt and water.

  Sunday, February 13

  Even with the kerosene heaters on full blast, it is cold in the mountain monastery. I sit in many layers, a wool-and-cotton onion. Around me, the collective respiration of monks and the members of the nichiyo sanzenkai make it seem as if it is the building that is breathing. During kinhin, I slip out with Koun to prepare the meal for the others. We work in a dark and freezing kitchen. “I’ll return to Zuioji in a few days, to wrap things up. I’ll send my things in the mail to you before I go.”

  “I can’t believe it’s been a whole year.”

  “I can’t either.”

  “Honestly, I’m a little nervous.”

  “Me too, T.”

  “It’s a kind of beginning for us, isn’t it.”

&nbs
p; “It’s always a beginning. Every day.”

  After the meal has been served and consumed, Koun and I wipe down surfaces and put things in order in the kitchen. Three of the monks take turns washing dishes in the icy water. They gather the heat from each other’s bare heads with their hands, laughing as they do this.

  We finish our work and Koun points to the door. “We have a few minutes—come with me. I want to show you something.” We walk behind the main buildings, to the frog pond. Clear ice edges the water and sunlight sparkles off everything. The sound of birdsong in the trees trickling down to us.

  “Beautiful.”

  “Yes, in every season. The ice will be gone soon. Maybe by this afternoon.”

  I kneel next to the water, touch a fingertip to its clear, mirror-like surface and then watch as the ripples echo out. “My mother, you know, she used to be a teacher. I had some of her overhead projector markers—do you know the kind? I kept them in my coat pocket. I had a habit of searching out ice in winter. I drew things. I wrote on it.”

  “What did you write?”

  “Anything. Everything. Mundane things. Beautiful things. Ugly things. All of my secrets.”

  “A kind of ritual?”

  “Yes, and then later it all melted when spring came. . . . Koun, do you remember? At the gate, when you entered the monastery a year ago, you were asked, ‘What is shugyo?’”

  “Yes?”

  “What was the correct answer?”

  He laughs and steps toward me, toward the edge of the water that—now once again placid—reflects us both. “It was ‘I don’t know. I came here to learn.’”

  ~

  Driving away from Shogoji toward home, I take in the view of a thawing landscape in sunlight. I am at the cusp of adolescence, leaning into snow, brushing it away from a smooth, opaque surface that reveals everything. Black or blue or red ink, all bright as blood.

  Thursday, February 17

  The phone rings shortly after sunrise, but I’ve been up for an hour or so already, trimming new bowls on the electric wheel in the kitchen. “Good news from the doctor so far,” says my mother, who has just come home from a check-up.

  “I’m happy to hear that.”

  She laughs, the sound transposing through the phone line into a digital music. “Well, it’s all just moment-by-moment. One day at a time, right?”

  “I guess that’s true—for all of us.”

  I return to work at the kitchen table after our chat, return to my place at the electric pottery wheel while the morning light shines through the window and the glass sliding doors, and it occurs to me that I have been here before, in some previous iteration of window, table, kitchen, creation: my mother and I in a three-window rented breadbox of a house in Nome, just south of the Arctic Circle. A blizzard rages outside—a true whiteout—the most dangerous version of this kind of storm. In fact, everyone had stories of people getting lost just by stepping out of their homes, how some survived and some were found months later, in the thaw. So we—my mother and I—are held in a relative safety in this house, which is really nothing more than a frail wooden shelter shifting against the tide of permafrost beneath it. We stand or sit at the kitchen table painting, a six-year-old girl with her tablet of watercolors and her thirty-one-year-old mother with her many tubes of oil paint. Both of us create scenes of an imaginary sunlit summer—rainbows, birds, rolling fields of flowers and green. We take breaks at intervals, moving together to the one window in the living room that again and again shows only a blinding, horizonless white.

  It is my mother, some hours later, who pulls me from my concentration and invites me to look out on what I felt could never return: a night sky filled with stars, the brilliant clarity of a full moon.

  Saturday, February 19

  “Are you up for a bit of a drive today?” I ask Satomi as she hops into my car.

  “Okay. Where to?”

  “Takamori. I want to find a place I discovered a long time ago.”

  “Ah, another mystery.”

  “Well, we are adventurers, aren’t we?”

  “What’s in Takamori that you want to find?”

  “A path in the woods, not far from the temple where Koun used to go every morning, when I first arrived in Japan. At that time, I was worried about many things—mostly, I was trying to figure out how to stay here legally. I was out walking—worrying and walking—while Koun was at his new job, and there was this trail into the bamboo, next to a pond. I didn’t think about the dangers, the snakes, the bugs, anything like that. I just saw this overgrown path and followed it.”

  “Where did it lead?”

  “At the end, there was a small cave—a hollowed out wall of rock, really. Inside was a stone Buddha. Weathered, very old. Most of the features of the face worn away. People had left things there—coins, flowers, sake.”

  “Ah, I see. Did you bring something to offer today?”

  “Yes. One of my bowls, some bottled water to pour into it.”

  “Oh sorry—can you go back to my house?”

  “Sure—why?”

  “I need better shoes for this adventure.”

  Monday, February 21

  It is final exams week at the university, and the campus is a bubble of collective concentration. The students with newly dyed black hair wear a somber seriousness in their faces, as if they’ve just stepped from childhood into the world of grown-up concerns.

  Shortly after I return home from work, the postman delivers a large, heavy box addressed from Shogoji. After I thank him and close the door, I maneuver the box up the stairs, into the spare tatami room. There, beneath the watchful eyes of a small Buddha, I carefully slice through tape with a knife. The smell of incense fills the room as I unfold the cardboard flaps and begin to pull out the much-used belongings of a cloistered monk.

  You’re an okesa monk and a rakusu monk now, I think. Two sides of the same paper. I know Koun would agree.

  Wednesday, February 23

  Everyone is late to pottery class—“taking care of their late-home-from-work husbands,” explains Sensei—so I sip tea and look at all the lovely work on display around the receiving room, asking questions about her creations in my halting, inadequate Japanese.

  I also ask about her teacher, but she shrugs and is not so forthcoming: “What’s to say? He was an old man, very strict. I studied with him for years, until it was time to move on and develop my own style.” She moves to a display case, slides open the glass, and lifts out two of his chawan—tea bowls—a small, black-glazed vessel with hints of iridescent blue and the other larger, with a crackled, lumpy white glaze that only partially veils the pink-white rough clay beneath. When I pass one bowl and then the other back to her, I notice how she takes each carefully with two hands and gently, gently places it on the shelf as if it were a living being, perhaps an embodiment of the old man himself.

  “Tracy-san, I have something for you. Or maybe it is a present for Koun-san.” I follow her out of the room and jump down onto the concrete of the firing area. She points to a box on the ground. “I fired all of these this past weekend. I was a little behind on student work.”

  I crouch over the big cardboard box, turning cup after cup in my hand.

  “So many! Did I make all of these?”

  “Yes.” She moves to my side and crouches next to me. “What do you see?”

  “I don’t know . . . cups?” I laugh.

  “Look again.”

  “Maybe . . . renshu.”

  “No, not only practice. It’s shugyo. It’s training.”

  Friday, February 25

  In the mail when I get home from my walk today there is a little package from Bryan. Inside is a DVD copy of the photos Dick has been organizing as well as some special chocolates that I had hinted at a longing for. A yellow sticky-note attached to the DVD reads simply, Thought you might get a kick out of this, which looks more like Thugs yadda getcha kout otus. (No wonder he was almost a doctor—his writing is another sort of
foreign language.) The photos are a kind of retirement project for my father-in-law. I’ve been hearing a lot about it lately via the family e-mails.

  I eat one of the too-sweet chocolates, wrap a blanket around my shoulders, and slip the DVD into the drive. Then I am transported to another era. Expansive scenery as backdrop to candid portraits of Dick and Viv in their twenties—younger than Koun and I are now—mixed in with a few photos from later decades. Family relatives (I can only assume) that I have never met in Montana and Texas. Pictures of the war in Vietnam: smiling buddies, tanks. Children there, too, hamming it up for the camera. Then hunting guns and broken birds, fishing and captured fish. A picture of Viv sleeping, angelic and childlike on a 70’s-style bedspread. Fancy cars with men standing in front of them—all old classics now. Ornate European architecture—surely from the year Dick was stationed in Germany during the war.

  Three hours later, when I close my eyes to sleep, I see vast American vistas and innocence and violence, lives that unravel like unspooled light, firefly trails that burn so brightly for a while before winking out. I can’t sleep, so I get up to sit with it all. I understand. I understand. This life, too, will pass.

  Saturday, February 26

  In the dormitory courtyard out front, the last of the girls are being collected by their parents. Standing at the window, I watch car after car depart. Through thin walls and glass, the shouts of farewell and laughter drift into the room around me. A near-but-distant sound.