IRON AND FLINT


She was already on the morning train when I got on at the country station, was sitting in the seat opposite the one I happened to take, and so from under my baseball hat I got to look at her while she gazed at the way to Kyoto.

First at her eyes that had fire in them as a little spark, with the iron and flint that made it, then at her small strong hands with all the character worn in, hands that had fellowed the world, its water and soil, the worn-nailed fingers clenched around the black velvet strings of a soft purply glittery purse of the kind young women used to carry back in the sepia days, when she was a young woman and young women wore kimono...

It was an old purse and the hands were old hands, a farm woman's hands, toughened like walnuts by work and weather, she wore baggy tweed pants, strong as iron but with a touch of non-work-clothes refinement suitable for a farm grandma's rare trip to the city, the pants in the fashion of monpei but distinctly not monpei, a fashion statement in its own way - she clearly had opinions about things - and her mauve jacket, brand new but decades old, they don't make them like that any more, she must have gotten it in one of those little village stores you pass by on drives through the countryside, that have the old wooden walls with little ancient windows where you see just hanging there for what appears to have been a very long time (forget about display these are just clothes after all, buy or pass by,) the taupe and mauve and beige and brown and gray goods in the windows: cardigans, jackets and pants you can't imagine who will buy because you don't live anywhere near that time...

But then all of a sudden in the midst of these hurriedly commuting and generally waning modern up-to-date lives there she is, in brusque just-sitting-there-stone-healthy-at-85 contrast to all this office paleness, this borrowed sophistication and fashionably impending transaction sweat: one beautiful old farmer woman in lovely old-new stodgy eternal clothes from a far away place of mind and time, fashion from way back when there was no fashion except a change from kimono and monpei...

This was rad back then, and that's what she still wears now, elderly rad, this mauve rough weave jacket with the just barely perceptible red threaded through, blossoms in the pattern somewhere, no doubt she knows what blossoms they are, and with shiny purple silver-speckled buttons, a pale violet scarf and one of those taupe sweaters from the window of such a store too, just a little silver in her black hair, her face brown-wrinkled, topographic with life, eyes that reflect all that can be known to the bone about garden and birth, time and death and what the hell are salaries...

She is like a rock in the midst of these fluxy tides and fickle currents, she is the secret rock of this country, of all countries, of all of us who have gotten this far, of whatever constancy humanity can lay claim to... sons and daughters know it is the mothers who carry it all, and if it all falls it is the mothers who remain to get on with the getting on...

I stared at her secretly until I dozed off, and when I awoke she was gone.

[First published in slightly different form in Kyoto Journal #40]