Today is August 13. Our Obon offerings are ready.
At the center of the offering table, surrounded by fruit and sweets, is the tiny watermelon from our home garden that I introduced recently in “Finding Little Signs of Summer”. We also added some peppers and eggplants from the garden.
And one more thing: we also offered “Hitotsuya cocoons.”
We grow vegetables in the field, raise plants for natural dyes, care for silkworms and receive the cocoons they make, then turn those cocoons into thread. Our daily life and our work overlap, and little by little they are shaping the Hitotsuya of today.
▼ A small watermelon and vegetables from our garden, together with “Hitotsuya cocoons,” placed among the Obon offerings.
Seeing vegetables harvested from the field and cocoons made by our silkworms side by side among the same offerings made me feel as if everything we had grown and made over the past year was laid out right in front of us.
None of them is especially large or splendid: a small watermelon, a few slightly misshapen vegetables, and cocoons that are almost weightless one by one. Even so, every one of them came from the life we live at home and at Hitotsuya.
There are things we completed this year, things we are still working on, things that went well, and things that are still very much in progress. With my hands together before the offerings, I told our ancestors about the way we are living now.
“This is what we’ve been doing, and we’re doing well.”
As I looked at the offerings, I began to think that Obon may naturally reflect the life of each household in that particular year. Looking into Obon once again, I also found an article from Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries titled “Annual Events and Food in Japan: Obon and Shojin Ryori”.
Obon is a tradition passed down over generations, but rather than simply repeating a fixed form, placing things we have grown ourselves during the year makes this year’s offerings feel like something that belongs to this year alone.
The small watermelon, the vegetables, and the cocoons.
We let our ancestors see our home as it is now, and Hitotsuya as it is now.