Country garden

(Baonghean) - Our garden is full of trees and flowers. Every tree planted in the garden holds the boundless love that our parents have for us. Over the years, many types of flowers have disappeared, some delicious guava varieties have vanished, and the plum trees that my father brought from Lao Cai have withered due to disease. But... my parents have never cut down a single tree, because every leaf, every branch holds cherished memories. And in her stories, my mother often begins with: "That tree is probably as old as you kids are now..."

The guava tree is the same age as my youngest brother. My mother is certain of this because that August afternoon, while working in the fields, she saw a young guava tree growing by the roadside and brought it home to plant. As she dug the hole, she whispered, "I'm planting this so you can climb it and pick the fruit later." That very night, she went into labor. My father ran to call the village midwife, and my youngest brother was born, his cries echoing throughout the poor neighborhood. The two starfruit trees are the same age as me; my father planted them so that his beloved daughter could hang a hammock and comb her hair later. The gnarled sapodilla tree is a year older than my brother; its flowers are becoming sparser, its fruit increasingly rare, its canopy covering my mother's rice drying yard, but no one ever thinks of cutting it down. The old jackfruit tree holds countless memories of the day my mother came to live as a daughter-in-law, the nights she would sneak out to the tree to sob, missing home. And it was under that same jackfruit tree that my mother secretly went to wipe away her tears when I got married…

Photo: Internet

Now, even though my parents' garden is already small, they've added a few more plants for the grandchildren. Little Tí loves custard apples the most, so Grandma goes to the market tirelessly to find and buy some young custard apple trees. Bống loves sapodilla, so a few new trees have appeared in the corner of the garden. That's where Grandpa used to grow chili peppers for pickling bamboo shoots; now the chili peppers have withered, and he says he's old and doesn't eat spicy food anymore. I married and moved far away, but my mother still tends to the basil in the garden. Even though my hair is now curly and short, every season she still picks soapberry to dry in the sun for later use. My youngest brother is always busy, but as soon as he gets home, he rushes to the garden, sometimes rummaging through the loquat bushes, sometimes perched on a guava tree, and other times straining his neck poking at grapefruit trees with a stick. Dad always laughs and says, "This boy is the most fond of snacks in the house." But thanks to my youngest brother's diligent return, the fruit trees in the garden don't rot as much. My mother never sold the fruit like other families because she always thought her children would come home, and if she sold it, they wouldn't have anything to eat. In reality, we only managed to find time to visit a few times a year. By then, the fruit might still be green, or sometimes by the time we got home, the last fruit had fallen to the ground, the season already over, shrouded in the night dew and morning sun…

The longing for home is different for each person. It might be the image of a banyan tree, a riverside, a village courtyard, a poetic river, or perhaps a train station where trains stop a few times a day. But for me, all those memories are concentrated in my family garden. It's where, at every family meal, my father would tell me to pick some lime leaves to sprinkle on the chicken for fragrance, or some perilla leaves for the frog stew with bananas to give it the perfect flavor. Or when the children were aching, my mother would always find some folk remedies in the garden that would heal quickly. The two rows of fragrant daffodils have been waiting for us to return for so many years. That alone is enough to make my longing sometimes burst into tears…

Vu Thi Huyen Trang