A Year of Daily Walks
This year I keep dreaming about Japan. Because of covid, we canceled a trip a week before take-off almost exactly one year ago, and so my mind keeps returning to my last visit almost six years ago. I remember walking all over Hiroshima; each day I'd leave my hostel and walk for a few hours until I got hungry. I'd stop and eat wherever I happened to be and then I'd keep walking, sometimes resting at a park or going into a shop to cool down from the heat. It seemed like the most cost-effective way to explore the city alone. One of these long walks brought me to The Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, where I bought these little triangle hangers from the gift shop. Those little hangers have been with me in every apartment since.
The weekend my partner and I decided we shouldn’t go see our families for Christmas because of the pandemic, we walked an hour through Brooklyn to pick up a small little Christmas tree. We'd never celebrated the holiday together and we tried to make the most of every single detail and find new traditions together. It felt silly to be sad when we were so fortunate. Our first decoration on the tree was a small photo on one of my little triangle hangers.
After those many miles of walking in Hiroshima years ago, a family opened their home to me because I didn’t know where to stay. The woman gave me a book on Hiroshima and told me that after the city was destroyed, a few ginkgo biloba trees survived. These trees were charred from the bomb, but they were able to grow leaves once again.
