Well Represented Here

My wife has been recording one-minute introductions to slices of life that she uses to communicate with smart Chinese women, considering modernity.  They’re short by design and protean so that they can be amassed and tagged easily enough to create a body of work.  “But what should I do today?” was the question. 

Trees.  Trees my love.  Our house is full of lovely deciduous trees that our Chinese brethren and sistren are unlikely to be aware of.  Consider, my love, the oak.  Here in the front yard and there in the back are oak trees.  They have wonderfully shaped and intoxicatingly green colored leaves.  They also produce acorns.  See here?  This is an acorn.  When we were young, we’d throw them at one another. 

Yes.  The oak.  It doesn’t grow in Beijing.  Nor, for that matter, in San Francisco.  Why?  Because its too damn, dry.  In Beijing we have willow and poplars because they have long tap roots that dig down deeply to where the water lies.  The poplar is the tree of the oasis.  The bai yang shu  is all you see when you go to Gansu and further on to Xinjiang, when you arrive in a town after crossing something inhabitable.  So admire for a moment then, the oak. 

And this guy here is the maple.  It’s a sugar maple, which is the state tree of New York.  Not to be confused with the national tree of Canada, the red maple.  The has its own cool leaf with its own cool color.  It too shuns SF and BJ.  It too is well represented here in our yard. 

So we head out to the oak and we shoot a few shots and settle on one where the oak is well-explained.  And we move on to the maple in the back yard and do the same.  I point out a sumac tree and what I think is a walnut.  “You know you could do something about poison ivy as well . . .  We don’t have poison ivy in Beijing”  But two trees is enough for today.  We are done.