January 4, 2020
Dear Nikiko,
I’m sitting in the bright light of January, summoning memories of our work together, thinking on the meaning of memory work, four days into the new decade.
Last night, I dreamt of my grandparents. They were returning from camp, but it wasn’t 1945, it was the present day, and they were alive, and coming home, and I was in my home making a bed for them to sleep in.
They seemed so happy. I was so happy to welcome them.
Perhaps healing is a kind of homecoming?
Before me on my writing desk is the stone we painted that afternoon last November, “memory crafting” with our elders at the Vintage Gardens Assisted Living Community. On it, inscribed in black sharpie: “Alma Teranishi Saito” and “Mitsuo Saito,” the names of my grandmother and grandfather.
You took it—along with a basket of similar stones—to Gila River, the place where our grandparents were incarcerated during the war.
You carried each stone, as we carry memory, to the desert basin where they made a home.
Have I thanked you enough for this?
Have I thanked you for making the journey, for carrying the weight of our memories, for bringing back home to me my family’s stone—their names made alive by the pilgrimage?
Have I thanked you for your incantation, for the words you read at Gila when our community gathered in annual pilgrimage?
I wish I could have been there to hear you in person.
I cheered you from afar, imagining the long car ride through southern deserts, the morning November heat, the stones laid in a circle—each one inscribed with the names of a survivor, our circle of elders.
“My generation is now the door to memory,” says Joy Harjo. “This is why I am remembering.”
You told me once: our generation is the last one to know the feel of the Nisei’s hands.
Nikiko, my hands are rough with winter—they’re new to me, they’re aging. In the dream, I use my hands to make a bed for them—Alma, Mitsuo; they stand shoulder to shoulder, waiting, happy—home.
“Memory keepers” is what we’ve been called. But perhaps we are more and less than this—we are currents, conduits. “I am memory alive,” says Harjo. “Memory is the nucleus of every cell; it’s what runs, it’s the gravity, the gravity of the Earth.”
Dear sister, are we memory alive? Are we doorways to memory?
Tell me who you are in the new year.
Tell me your prayers—your “memories of the future,” as our friend Will puts it.
And let me thank you, again and again, for your hands—their labor, their holding, their strength through each season of memory work.
Bless the light that gathers in your open palms.
Love,
Brynn