Also known as an empty vase.

A wedding gift that over the decades has held bouquets of tulips, daffodils, all manner of wildflowers, yarrow and goldenrod, bunches of dogwood, wild pussy willow stems, sometimes nothing more than a single leaf from a giant sage green hosta, and just a year or two ago it was home to a birthday arrangement from a faraway friend and the magic of it kept bits of that arrangement going for a ridiculous number of weeks.

But we have young cats now and they jump everywhere and notice EVERY NEW THING that’s brought into the house. A single hosta leaf included.

And so, Ikebana — the Japanese art of minimalist flower arrangement, the idea being that the empty space around the stems is an important part of the arrangement.

Ikebana translates to : making flowers come alive.

And so, extreme Ikebana : the empty vase itself becoming the space where bouquets of memories and memories of bouquets… live.

All of which, invisible to the cats.