Corona Letters #32

It's early in the morning and I'm looking out the window at the birds waking up and the flowers that seem to have bloomed overnight.    She suddenly appears next to me so quietly it takes me a moment to register her presence.

"My mother used to call me that."  she says pointing out at the yard at a myriad of flowers and plants.

She is losing words from her memory like a tree loses it's autumn leaves.   One day she has a word and the next day it floats away somewhere that is almost impossible to retrieve.

I look out at my yard at the flowers and try to figure out what her mother might have called her.

She was not born here, English was not her native tongue, I do not know the flower names in Korean and what might sound comforting in a mother's gentle whisper.  In English we might call our children "pumpkin" or "sweet pea" or even "rose".   Does Rose in another language sound as sweet?

Her pointing gets more urgent.  "Those, those!" she says.   I try to follow her finger and all I can see is forcythia.

"Do you mean the forsythia?" I ask.

"Yes! Yes!" she says with child-like excitement.

I have never heard Forsythia used as a pet name in English, it's not terribly melodic in our language so I ask her if she remembers how to say it in Korean.

She gets a look on her face that I have become quite familiar with, a look that means she cannot remember.  She is sad and disappointed.   She wants to remember.

Her birthday is in March and I think about how forsythia is one of the first flowers to bloom.  Perhaps in Korea they bloom in March.

My oldest daughter, whose birthday is just a week away, was born in mid-May.   The lilacs were blooming everywhere around the time of her birth.   I started maternity leave a week before she was born and as I roamed the streets near our apartment, lilacs and their tell-tale fragrance were everywhere I turned.   Then when she was born, on her first outings, they were still everywhere.
It's been twenty three years since she was born but the smell of a lilac still brings me back to that time in an instant.   I call her my sweet lilac girl, and she will forever be that, even when I am no longer here to say it.

I feel a kind of kinship with my mother-in-law's mother, a person I never met.   I can imagine her half a world away, so many years ago, connecting the sight and smell of forsythia with her infant daughter.   The flower and girl are so strongly linked that even years after her mother's death, the daughter feels her mother's love and hears her mother's voice upon seeing the flower.

My mother-in-law is lost in thought, and I imagine she is traveling to another time and place.
Then she starts to tell me, "even after I moved to this country my mother would sometimes call me and say, "hello (she says this in Korean) Gaenali!"

"Gaenali!" I say, "Does that mean forcythia in Korean?" I ask.

She looks at me confused.  "Yes.  But, how did you know that?"

"You just said it."   I told her.

"I did?" she asked.

"Yes you did, Gaenali" I answered and she giggles, perhaps it is strange to hear this word coming from her daughter-in-laws mouth.

Moments later the word is gone from her memory.  Poof!   But she continues to look at the forsythia with such intensity and a kind of longing, that I realize that she doesn't need a word for them to invoke sweet memories.

She will always be her Gaenali.

She will always be my lilac girl.

This will never float away like an autumn leaf.

This is part of the tree.


Note:  After doing some research about forsythia after writing this, I have discovered that most types of forsythia are actually originally from East Asia and there is a specific "Korean Forsythia" that blooms earlier than most.  This means that a bloom in March is more than plausible.