There is no time that reminds me more strongly of Mom than the times when we have a reading or a talk or some sort of exciting Idiots’Books-related event. Mom was always there in the first or second row, giddy with excitement and visible pride – even from the very start, when we had no idea what we were doing. Which was definitely the case for our first reading at Bookplate, five years ago (note the photo of Mom trying to take a picture of us, with confounding results). On Friday we had our 5-year anniversary celebration, again in the back room of Bookplate, and her absence was certainly felt.

I always try to bring her along to whatever exciting thing it is we have going on – I have a few lockets with her picture inside, and I can’t tell you how it settles the nerves (say, when I’m in an important meeting with a publishing company) to feel like she’s right there with me.

I used to own three, but the third is sadly lying on a sidewalk somewhere in New York. Mom always did love New York.

As much as the big events are reminders of Mom, there are infinite everyday events where I feel her absence. Basically, every trip to the bathroom involves running the gauntlet of her creative spirit – we have to walk through a small storage area that is full of her most recent batch of pottery.

Sometimes, if I’m in a rush or carrying a squirming child, I’ll accidentally bump into the shelving, causing a shudder of clinking ceramics, and my heart will stop in a panic until everything settles back into silence. I remind myself to be more careful, but it still happens in the mad rush of the every day.

The bathroom door has a little sign on it, letting us know whether the heat is on or off. If the heat is on, we are to keep “the” door closed.

This is because the bathroom is attached to the storage area, and the heat needs to stay in the bathroom. I especially love this sign because Mom obviously went back after she wrote it and decided that the definite article was necessary. The other side of the sign just says “Heat is off,” with no directive.

Once inside the bathroom, there is one of her most magnificent pieces of pottery, a huge “castle wall”. A couple of months before she died, she put some extra proteas in it that she had leftover from a flower arranging demonstration she had done. I took a picture then and meant to write a post about how awesome it was to live in the same space as a master potter and flower arranger. But I never wrote the post. The flowers have dried now, and are going to seed, but I just can’t throw them away.

And that’s just the trip to the bathroom. There are a million other things. I have a brown mole/liver spot above my eyebrow that’s getting darker as I get older.

Mom had one in the exact same place. Except that, just the other day, I realized mine was actually a mirror image of hers (mine over my right eye, hers over her left) – but I had always thought they were in the same place because I only ever see mine in the mirror.

And then there was the time a few days ago where I left out some noodles in a bowl that was within Iggy’s reach, and when I came home, the bowl was on the floor in pieces and licked absolutely clean.

It was kind of a “junker” bowl that mom made (one for me and one for Matthew) for ramen and katsudon, my favorite meal of hers. She would consider it a sketch, something she would never sell to (or even make for) a client. So, breaking it was another little tragedy born out of carelessness.

And then last night I went into the kids’ bedroom to check on them (they often end up falling asleep upside-down or on the floor or under a pile of plastic crap). I had made up pillow cases for each of them with a photo of mom on it, so they could be reminded of her every day in a small way. For Kato’s pillow case, I used this image:

And when I looked in on him, he had fallen asleep in just the right spot.

It was a sweet reminder that she’ll always be with us.

As much as Dad insists that Mom didn’t like to have a fuss made over her, she also wasn’t one to humbly slough off praise – she delighted in it. And as hard as it is for me to be reminded of her every day in so many ways, it doesn’t mean I don’t want to remember her. So I am most thankful for a conversation we had in Japan, a month or so before she died. We were visiting with her very best friends, and they were reliving the old days (we staged a photo similar to one they had taken in high school together, seen in the foreground).

One of her friends asked me how I felt about Mom as her daughter (and, of course, Mom had to translate this from the Japanese). And I said, “I’m proud of her.” You could see Mom light up, and as she told her friends, they all sighed, and beamed, and said how true it was. I’m just glad I told her so.