Dashi is a meeting. North and south. Mountain water and open sea. Plant and fish. Time and transformation. Konbu is gathered in the brief height of summer, along the cold edges of Hokkaido. It is laid out under the sun, then kept to rest—sometimes for years.

I have thought about that often. How a moment — so brief, so easily lost — can take hold. How, even as memory loosens its grip, something deeper continues to register.

The season of sansai gathers momentum, one wild green giving way to the next. Tsukushi yields to watercress, watercress to warabi. And then, at the height of this brief and breathless interval, comes taranome

Foragers do not easily reveal their wild gardens. But if you come, I will take you. We will walk the hills together and gather what the season offers — handfuls of what others might overlook, what grows unbidden, what insists on being found.

Meals define the cadence of the day. They pause the forward press. They offer pleasure. A flicker of renewal. They restore us. 

in Japan, one prefers to hint rather than proclaim. A stolen glance. Scent whispered on the wind. That is what moves us. That is what lingers.

In Japan’s seasonal almanac, this is a sacred hinge.
 A turning inward. 
A breath held before the descent. Insects burrow underground. 
Fields are drained for harvest. The world quiets, and so do we.

When I met Koga-san — a teacher whose sensibility, reverence, and rhythm mirror my own — something opened. With her, tea became not just a study, but a language. A conversation. A devotion. The one I had longed for.

The salon is a home for many homages: my mother’s table, Hanako’s pottery, cherry and camphor woods. And there, in the heart of it all, hangs Yuki’s noren curtain woven from local vines.

Last summer, I stood in a covered alcove of a barn in rural Vermont, holding a block of cherry wood, watching my mother work. Seventy-five years old, her hands weathered and strong — shaped by a lifetime.