Last week, I was really worried about my tree.
You see I have the luxury, in a city of 5 million plus people, to have an apartment where my living room and bedroom windows look out into a mass of green. My personal oasis, dominated by a large tree with delicate leaves that, in the right light, gives a gentle green glow to everything in the house.
I have come to love this tree. It makes me feel calm and grounded.
Which is why, when we got home from our winter vacation, I was concerned to see that the tree looked, well, a little peaked. Not so green. A little sparse. The concern turned to alarm a few days later when, as has become my habit, I stepped out onto the porch as the sun was coming up and saw that it was almost completely bare. Not only that but the branches were looking decidedly dead.
What was happening to my tree? I wracked my brain. Did this happen last year? Is it happening to other similar trees? What could be done? Was it the flooding in December? Did my tree drown?
After pulling myself together, and reminding myself that it is very unlikely for a tropical tree to drown, I quizzed everyone in the household. What did the tree look like last year? Did it do this before? We decided that this might just be something the tree does.
So I decided to postpone raising the full alarm, postpone the worry, watch, and wait. This was not easy. Patience is not necessarily one of my virtues.
I have often commented since moving here that one thing I find a bit disorienting is the complete absence of seasons. We joke that there is hot, hot and wet, and really hot. But we don’t get the natural rhythm of the shortening of days into winter and the wonderful return of the sun and green growing things. Nope, we get twelve hours of light, twelve hours of dark and sunrises and sunsets that take about a minute and a half.
So we make our own seasons. We decorate for Christmas, include orchids with our poinsettias, note the solstice with some candles. Even the clothing stores are in on the charade, showing coats and sweaters in the shop windows in December and January.
So imagine my delight when my tree started to sprout new, vibrantly green leaves. On the eve of Chinese New Year, in the dead of winter (although you wouldn’t know it to look around), my tree is giving me my own personal spring.
In the end I didn’t need to worry, I didn’t need to fret. All I had to do was wait. And isn’t that the eternal lesson of spring? Not a bad reminder to start out a new year.
Happy New Year. Gong Xi Fa Cai.
