I don’t know whether I just didn’t notice this before or whether it takes warm, wet weather to bring it out, but the 50 year-old Chadō Kaikan building where we hold our practice chaji smells like the cottage in Sawyer, Michigan where the Boydstons spent many happy, lazy, summer vacation days. No beach within walking distance here, though. And no laziness.
A sticky morning in samue, cleaning tatami and picking up leaves in the roji garden. We finished just far enough ahead of schedule to be able to watch one of the mizuya boys (ten-year apprentices to Oiemoto) rake the gravel garden outside Shinka no ma into shape, starting with long parallel sets of grooves, finishing with concentric rings radiating from the boulders on which he perched in his wooden geta sandals.
Home for the second shower of the day and the change into kimono. Then lunch and the sick last-minute realization that I’d made the rookie mistake of not bringing my fan; it was still in a pocket of my samue and I didn’t have time to go fetch it. I felt naked without it all afternoon, but at least I was able to borrow Sean’s for my aisatsu (greetings) with Verena, the chaji’s host, at the beginning and end of the function.
Verena’s chaji was a lovely thing. The afternoon was so dark that I could barely see across the room. The warm, wet, still air somehow seemed to me to confer an extra intimacy to the gathering, and heavy rain fell periodically to provide hypnotic background noise. In the machiai, we tasted hot water from kumidashiwan cups decorated with a tsubotsubo pattern and served on a tray with the “spinning top” koma pattern. As “last guest” (makkyaku) at the chaji, I was responsible for distributing and collecting the cups, as well as for working with the first guest later to return dōgu to the host after haiken. The first guest at a tea function has the hardest role, as I learned last month: besides having to make intelligent conversation with the host, he or she has to know what to do and when, without being able to just follow the example of the guest ahead, like everyone else can. The last guest is second-busiest, and also has to have a certain amount of tea know-how; he or she is the errand-runner in the group.
Verena chose for her tabakobon in the machiai a Finnish basket woven of birch bark, bearing a Chōsen Karatsu hiire. The tabakobon in the koshikake was handled, lacquered a deep red, round–but actually finely-faceted, not truly circular. Ichō leaf shapes were cut out of its high sides. Its hiire was a porcelain butter container from Germany.
We made our way through the roji during one of several fortuitously-timed breaks in the rain, and slid into the tea room to admire the scroll, an elegant piece of calligraphy by Daisōshō that referred to an old Chinese Rip Van Winkle-like legend. Verena used a tall unryū kettle on a ceramic furo, and a wooden mizusashi shaped like a square well bucket (tsurube) with hinged lid; these give a cool feeling for summer and are the appropriate vessel for temae using famous water like the kind we drank today, drawn in the morning from Nashinoki Jinja. She brought in her charcoal for the shozumi procedure in an aburakago basket, and used a little woven-bark incense box. Her habōki brush was made of owl feathers.
Then she served sweets she’d made herself: bean paste wrapped in folds of mochi that she’d named “White Night.” Their shape was reminiscent of the butterflies that grace Finland’s summers, when the sky stays bright throughout the night. She’d used a little brown sugar in the bean paste for a very nice flavor a little different than what we’ve gotten used to.
The rain stopped in time for our return to the koshikake-machai for a break, and resumed after Verena called us back for koicha. She’d taken down the scroll and hung a boat-shaped bamboo hanaire carrying a beautifully arranged white tessen blossom. All of the dōgu she used passed through my hands, but the room was so gloomy that I could tell very little about them. Verena made koicha in a Seto bowl and a colossal heavy beast of a red Raku with deeply scored sides; Sean observed that it probably could have held enough koicha for all the guests in attendance. The tea was scooped from an Oribe katatsuki chaire with a chashaku named “Kagura” (sacred dance), carved by Oiemoto. The tea itself was a Kanbayashi variety called “Ryū no Kage”–shadow of the dragon–that went with Verena’s dragon-patterned kobukusa.
Before moving on to thin tea, Verena served dry sweets she’d also made herself: fine sugar pressed into water shapes and rolled-and-cut green maple leaves flavored with a hint of ginger. She brought the tea, Yume no mukashi from Ippōdō, out in a funny little ceramic natsume in the shape of a miniaturized Korean kimchee jar. Its large loose lid made a nice tinkling scraping sound when it rubbed against the body of the vessel. The first chawan was a wonderful warped Shigaraki; following were a shallow red Raku hirajawan, a white idokatachi bowl by an American artist, an Iraho bowl that felt very nice in my hands, and a bowl with a Raku-like shape that I took a closer look at the next day, in good light, to discover that it was glazed in an unusually bright rainbow of colors–its interior was a beautiful shocking purple.
It was the third practice chaji for the April students, and for me the most enjoyable yet. Though certain points remained a little confusing, we seem to have grasped the general outline of the chaji, and so were able to make our way relatively smoothly through it, enjoying the tea, the toriawase, and the company. After concluding with our formal farewell to the host and a wrap-up session with Hamana-sensei and Gary-sensei, we switched on the lights, cleaned up, packed the dōgu and returned them to the women’s dorm to be cleaned and put away properly later.
Nobody seemed to have the energy for a dissolute Friday night, so we (shudder) watched, at Szymon’s request, the lousy “comedy” How High in Sean’s room and then chatted until a look at the clock made us think we should get some sleep.