the plants of this place

the plants of this place are going to miss you, i wrote — so i collected them on a page and composed them this way, for you. now you can take these plants with you anywhere you go: these ferns and yellow dandelions from the ditch around the house, these weeds and wildflowers from the rice paddies by the long straight road, these purple bulbous flowers and fanning green things, plucked from the beach. then a single japanese maple leaf, and silvery leaves from the peninsula, where we drove together on that one road trip, that one weekend, when you took me to visit your friends in their mountain homes.

it took me a while to collect all of them. but i did. i collected them one by one and pressed them in books, waited until they dried enough to glue — with shoji glue we used to glue the rice screen windows, on paper we bought from the 100 yen store — and made these plant compositions, for you.

i hope that they will be a reminder for you — so that you know you always have a home here. they will welcome you back, no matter where in the world you go, how far away or what season it is. the plants of this place will be here.