A Plate of Salad, Fallen leaves, and Peru
After a short four-day trip, I returned home again.
A very cold day. How could autumn have ended while I was away?
The coffee I drank four days ago was still sitting in the server, cold and heavy,
and the perfume I was sure I had packed in my suitcase had been hiding deep inside the sofa.
Tokyo’s unmistakably bright sunlight settled on the carpet in a perfect square.
I felt as though I had woken from a dream.
Peru — my beloved orange-colored cat —
had gained a little weight,
and the stain on the bridge of her nose had darkened.
In those four days I watched two films and ate enormous meals at every turn.
The first thing I cooked upon returning was two eggs, an onion, and a can of smoked oysters,
fried together with a splash of soy sauce and a small piece of butter.
But today, I wanted a salad plate
with the tzatziki dressing I love most.
I made the salad in this order:
- Cut the sweet potato I had boiled in the morning (but never ate) into small cubes, and sauté it in olive oil with a little bit of honey.
- When the sweet potato is half-fried, tear maitake mushrooms by hand and add them to the pan. Add a generous piece of butter.
- While the sweet potato and mushrooms cook, tear lettuce by hand and rinse it. Prepare the avocado and cucumber.
- Chop everything small, like a chopped salad. I used three-quarters of an avocado and one cucumber. Japanese cucumbers are unbelievably thin. At this point, remove the sweet potato and mushrooms from the pan.
- Make the dressing — plenty of Greek yogurt, half a lemon, two sprigs of dill, one clove of garlic, and lots of olive oil.
- Whisk whisk whisk.
- Grate in a bit of lemon peel.
- Plate the vegetables, starting with the largest pieces, and pour the dressing generously over the top. Toss everything lightly with tongs. Finish with a few leaves of dill and Italian parsley. Crush the walnut brittle gifted by J and sprinkle it over the finished salad. Finally, drizzle olive oil in two generous circles.
I spent nearly an hour making the salad,
and the fullness that vegetables give is as crisp
as the first coffee of an early morning.
Placed on my favorite thin cobalt-blue plate,
the salad somehow looked like fallen leaves someone — perhaps a courteous passerby —
had gathered along the roadside without any particular reason.
Fallen leaves make the most vivid sound of anything that has ever grown on a tree.
What is the difference, I wonder,
between the fleeting disappointment of gulping down an expensive coffee
in a café where you want to linger for hours
and the quiet regret of realizing that the autumn we loved
has turned into winter without a single letter?
Words that come easily when I think of autumn:
reading, parting from something, a low cry, a wool scarf, footsteps,
a pear that ripened slowly, a last song, cinnamon, an orange-colored cat, black coffee.
Autumn is a small country — like Peru,
something you imagine while waiting for a departing flight, sipping coffee,
or wandering near the gate of a city you barely know, imagining why others leave.
As of today, this year’s autumn comes to an end.
A year is too long to wait for a lover,
but waiting for another autumn is a pleasant thing.
Just like a plate of salad,
leaves never gather in a single color, and autumn is always like that.