That's Not a Tao.

It’s been wet.  Raining, day after day at the end of April.  My wife has commented on it.  My daughters don’t like it.  I can recall being in Beijing and hearing my mother complain about how dreadful the weather was at this time of year, last year.  The only New Yorker, I find myself defensive.  “Yes, but Beijing was dry and dusty.  The rain will saturate this place and suddenly all the plants will grow like a jungle!”  I’ve said it more than once. 

On more than one occasion this month, I offered up a truism as if it were a Chinese four-charactered chengyu embedded with ancient wisdom: “We always say: 'April showers, bring May flowers.'”  It is April 30^th, the last day one can say such a thing contextually with any gravitas.  One assumes that all people of the temperate climates have an idiom like this in their folklore. 

I went over to the mdgb.net, online Chinese dictionary I often utilize.  If you enter “idiom” in the search function plus whatever key word you’re looking for, you’ll get all the relevant chengyu listed.  I was expecting to have an approximate translation pop right up.  I searched for showers and flowers but got nothing.  The term “April showers”?  No, the moons wouldn’t have been designated that way.  “Flowers” and “Rain” maybe?  No.  I shall have to press on this with a human being.

I have tried for last few days to photograph the buds on the flowering tree beside our driveway.  The Seek app doesn’t do much for buds in mid gestation.  The bark didn’t suggest anything more than an apple or a cherry.  I’d suspected this was a crabapple.  My wife, understandably did not like the idea of a tree, so named in her front yard. Today, the AI has spoken:  It is a Chinese Quince.  Walking around, photographing the deliberate plants of the yard, I was surprise that there were many that were hyphenated Japanese:  Japanese Spirea, Japanese Spindle Tree and Japanese Pachysandra came up one after the other the other day, causing me to wonder if this wasn’t some sort of deliberate Niponification of the landscape.    My wife is skeptical when we look up the Chinese name for quinse:   No!  That’s not a tao. 楂.   Regardless, tomorrow, May first, looks like it will be sunny and warm and that Chinese Quince is about to explode in color.

Thursday, 4/30/20