A couple of days after we arrived in Kyoto, my man and I went on a long cycle across the city (hence the dodgy outfit in the photo below!) and out west, through rice paddies and bamboo forests under a huge blue sky. I wanted to show him where I lived for a formative year when I studied here at the tender age of 19, doing homestay with a Japanese family.
I had written them a postcard and intended to pop it through their door, hoping to arrange to meet up some time soon. But when we turned into their road, my homestay mother was out in the street chatting to a neighbour. “Besu???” she cried. (There is no ‘th’ sound in the Japanese language so my name becomes Besu!) I was surprised she recognised me after more than 15 years, but she did right away. Within five minutes she had called over my homestay father (the sweetest old man ever), invited us in for sweet potatoes and tea, phoned her daughter, got the old photo albums out and got the neighbours round!
With my homestay parents, Mr & Mrs Ito, outside the house I lived in for a year aged 19
As we sat in their living room sipping tea I had a kaleidoscope of flashbacks – feeding fish sticks to their dog from the little kitchen table, making long distance calls to my family from the phone by the window (no Skype back then!), checking the bottom step of the staircase for letters that had arrived in thin blue airmail envelopes, being dressed in a kimono for my coming-of-age ceremony back when I was 20… one after another the memories came rushing back, and it was lovely to be able to share them with my man.
When we had finished up our tea and my man had polished off the last of the sweet potatoes, we and half the neighbourhood headed over to Heiankyo for a festival by Ikeshita pond, with more tea served by ladies in kimonos. What a lovely unexpected interlude that was – and such a blessing to know there are people in this city with whom we go way back.
