A first-grader had become a fourth-grader

The miso I made was pale.

Quite different from the colour I was used to seeing on the shelf.

But I was not uneasy.

If anything, I was only looking forward to it.

This pale thing will take a year and turn into that colour.
All I have to do is wait.

A gift to my future self

Once it is packed away, there is nothing for me to do.

Spring comes, summer passes, autumn arrives. All that while, the miso grows on its own.

What I found by doing it was that miso is much simpler than I had thought.

Little work. Few failures.
At worst, some mold appears on the surface. Not once has the whole batch been lost.

The one who had decided it was difficult was me.

I move my hands for a single day, and then I wait.
With only that, by the next winter there is miso of my own.

It felt like a gift to my future self.

The day I first opened the lid

One year later.

When I opened the lid, a dark liquid had gathered at the edge of the miso.

It was the thing called tamari.

I scooped a little with my fingertip and tasted it.

―― Delicious.

Deep, and yet with no sharp edges. Sweetness underneath the savoriness.
I did not think of pouring it over anything. I wanted to go on tasting it just as it was.

And then I made miso soup.

With miso I had made myself, I made miso soup, and drank it.

It was delicious.

But it was not only delicious.

The feeling that I had been able to make this spread through me, slowly.

I was very happy.

There is a phrase, temae-miso (手前味噌).
It comes from boasting about the miso of your own house, and came to mean praising yourself.

At that moment, I felt I understood it.

You want to boast. Even if it is a little salty, you want to call it “a strong-flavoured year.”

What three-year miso shows me

The one-year miso was so good that I made it again the next year. And the year after.

Do that, and you come to have two-year miso. Three-year miso.

Whenever I open a three-year miso, there is something I think of.

When I made this, my child was a first-grader.

Now, a fourth-grader.

Three years of miso and three years of a child are the same length.

And yet the miso only deepened its colour, slowly, while the child grew taller, speaks in different words, and can do more things.

I remember that small hand of three years ago.
The hand that was mashing the soybeans.

The child of that day is no longer here.

Thinking so makes me a little wistful, and yet glad.

That child is beside me now

When the miso comes to the table, my child says:

This is the one I made.

The soybeans they mashed three years ago are now right there in front of them.

Food stops being something made somewhere and carried in, and becomes something that began in your own hands.

I think I was able to hand over that feeling.

(―― What was happening inside the miso, I will write another time.)