Pottery shard (62)

I am newly engaged in a loose writing group, called Scribe Lab, where we are reading similar readings (on flash—fiction, nonfiction, prose poetry) and posting daily to a shared site, maybe about the readings, maybe a snippet of our own writing, maybe a question or a random thought. At the beginning of each month—this group lasts for six—the leader, a poet, Rae Gouirand, posts some thoughts, some questions, some themes to write about or into. For January, one of her question-themes was "Where does here come from? What does your here look like? When you think about here, what comes up?" 

I am determined to share some bit of writing there every day, and more to the point, to use the communal energy to help me work on my own writing. I've got two essays in progress, one on death, one on fear. They are my main focus.

Yesterday, though, I felt like goofing off (no death! no fear!), and so I did an exercise from the flash nonfiction book I'm reading through. It was to describe three items on your desk. Here's one of my items:

And here's what I wrote:

First, a broken bowl. The shard of a broken bowl, I should say. I don’t know what sort of clay it is, but the interior is shiny off-white with salt-and-pepper flecks; the outside is white, blue, and black, uneven lines in Vs, though the bottom is tan and rough, and the round base, the size of a half dollar, has a calligraphic inscription: the maker’s mark. We bought five of these, no doubt—one doesn’t buy sets of four in Japan, because the number 4, shi, is a homonym for death; and we still have two intact bowls, but we wouldn’t have bought a set of three. So yes, five, and shipped them home along with other more fragile pieces of pottery, some of which broke, because we didn’t pack them well. But all of these bowls arrived intact, I believe. It’s been forty years, so it’s possible one did not make it. In any case, we now have two and a third. They are not large: a good size for rice, maybe, or miso soup as appetizer—or a small serving of ice cream. This broken one is still solid; it has a heft to it. I keep it on my desk to remind me of adventure—in 1982, my husband and I spent three months traveling through Japan, a delayed honeymoon—and of the enduring shared values in my marriage. To remind me of fine craftsmanship and handwork. To remind me of shibui, simple beauty.