Healing Piano Music: Mayuko

I picked up the phone, the one connected to their workroom in the basement where they were doubtless preparing floral arrangements for a wedding dinner. She said she would be right up.

It was: a hotel across the street from mine, a memorable November day in Tokyo.

She spoke gently as she trained the supple stalks this way and that, recounting her days in England and how unbearably cold those days were.

She was a fluffy white cloud in an otherwise bitterly cold blue sky. I thought about her one day, having come back to Vancouver, and this improvised piano music came to be.

The garden at the Nezu Museum in Tokyo