My grandmother threw rice at every wedding she attended well into her nineties. Long after guests switched to bubbles, bells, flower petals, and biodegradable confetti, she arrived with a small cloth pouch and ignored anyone who warned her about birds. Rice remembers things bubbles cannot, she would say, as though the explanation were obvious.
After she died, my mother found shelves of glass jars in the pantry. Each contained a handful of dried rice labeled with a wedding date and the names of the couple. Some went back more than seventy years. Folded inside every jar was a small square of paper bearing one of several marks: a circle, a slash, a pair of parallel lines, occasionally something resembling a knot.
We assumed it was sentimental record keeping until my mother began comparing the jars with family history.
The slashes belonged almost exclusively to marriages that ended early. Circles marked long unions. Parallel lines appeared beside couples who stayed married but lived largely separate lives. The knotted symbol was rare. Every marriage bearing it had survived circumstances that should have destroyed it: disappearances, affairs, prison sentences, decades of resentment, even one case where the couple divorced and remarried each other three times.
My grandmother apparently knew which symbol to draw by watching the rice fall.
My mother began testing the method at weddings. A wide scatter that bounced freely across the pavement usually meant the couple would grow apart without catastrophe. Rice that landed close around their feet suggested endurance. Grains that struck one person and avoided the other entirely corresponded disturbingly well with later illness or abandonment.
Then came my wedding.
My mother used rice from my grandmother’s old supply, throwing it as we left the ceremony. Her face changed almost immediately. She gathered several grains from the pavement before anyone could step on them and sealed them in a napkin.
She has refused to tell me what pattern they made.
Months later I found her new collection of jars. Mine sat on the top shelf with no symbol on the paper inside. Instead, the rice itself had arranged into a narrow ring against the glass, leaving the center completely empty.
I asked her what it meant. She admitted she did not know because my grandmother had never recorded anything like it.
Since then, my spouse and I have both started dreaming of the same room: a long table covered with white cloth, two empty chairs at the far end, and rice falling continuously from somewhere above. My mother has begun checking our jar every morning because the ring keeps tightening by a few grains at a time, though nobody has opened the lid.
©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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