A single photograph, sent by her son. Evening on La Rambla, in Barcelona. A young Ritsuko and her husband, and their still-small son and daughter, stand in a row beneath the street trees.
"Now, when was that," Ritsuko said, tilting her head a little. What she was sure of: it was the summer before her son started grade school. 1988, or '89. The family's very first trip abroad.
It began with a book about Gaudí. Her husband had borrowed it from a colleague, and it sat on the desk for the longest time. One day Ritsuko opened it and said, almost to herself, "Someday, I'd love to go." That was the start of everything.
The trip was anything but easy. Her son tripped again and again on the unfamiliar cobblestones, and Ritsuko — she laughs about it now — went wide-eyed every time a cold soup arrived at the table. And yet —
Walking along La Rambla as a family, in the evening — I can still feel exactly what that was like.
In the dry air, the orange streetlamps came on one by one, and from somewhere far off she could hear a flower seller calling and someone playing a guitar. Her daughter walked hand in hand with her, she says, and her son walked clutching the hem of his father's jacket.
The photographs from that trip were gathered into a single album, and for a long time they slept quietly at the back of a closet.
More than thirty years went by, and her son, grown now, happened to open that album. Looking at pictures of a self he couldn't remember, he found he wanted to hear about them once more — in his mother's own voice. A single photo brought that summer evening home to the family again.
— The young family in the photo says nothing. But Ritsuko's words opened, once more, a stretch of family time they had all but forgotten.
