Flash fiction by Huina Zheng

The pine tree

There is a park near my home, with a long, winding path running through it. When I was in elementary school, every afternoon at four o’clock, my grandfather arrived outside the iron gate of my school, riding his worn-out Forever bicycle to pick me up. He then took me to the park even when my mother objected, insisting that I should go straight home to do my homework, that textbooks were the only proper way to learn. My grandfather smiled and said, “Let Lan look at the trees first. The trees are teaching her too.”

In the park, my grandfather held my hand and guided me to look at different plants.

In spring, he pointed to the golden trumpet trees. At first, only a few scattered yellow blossoms appeared at the tips of the branches, but within a week, the entire tree was covered in brilliant gold.

In summer, we often sat on the grass beside the crape myrtle bushes. The flowers bloomed in small clusters. Pale pink. Light purple. Milky white. Like clouds of color diffused across the sky. My grandfather said, “A few bloom today, a few more tomorrow. That’s how the whole summer passes.” We waited there, watching to see which new blossoms had opened that day.

In autumn, the fragrance reached us the moment we entered the park. The scent of osmanthus came in waves, drifting in and out with the wind, lingering faintly around us. At those times, my grandfather spoke very little. We walked slowly and breathed deeply.

When winter arrived, the plum blossoms bloomed. The trees, once full of green leaves, shed them without notice, and then, on some cold morning, burst into pink and pale white blossoms all over their bare branches. When the breeze passed through, petals spun as they fell, scattering across the withered grass like a spill of soft-colored paint. I always wanted to pick them up, but my grandfather said, “Let them lie there. They’re a gift from the tree to the earth.”

I thought my grandfather loved flowers most, but that wasn’t true. Each time before we left, he led me past the flowers and brought me to a quiet corner of the park. There stood a single pine tree. Tall and upright. Dark green needles layered upon one another.

My grandfather patted the rough bark and said to me, “Look. Spring comes and autumn goes, flowers bloom and fall. All the liveliness belongs to them. But this pine tree stays the same. Green in summer, green in winter; the same in the rain, the same in the sunshine.”

“But Grandpa,” ten-year-old me asked, puzzled, “if it looks the same all the time, isn’t it boring?”
He touched my head, the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes deepening as he smiled. “You’ll understand one day,” he said. “The world rises and falls, but there are always things like this pine tree that remain steadfast.”

I couldn’t understand why not changing mattered. I loved novelty, change, and exploration.

Years later, I left the small town with the park behind and went to university in the unfamiliar city of Guangzhou, then lived and worked in Shanghai, Beijing, and Hangzhou. I broke up with a boyfriend I had loved for six years. My mother passed away suddenly from a bout of influenza. Three pregnancies ended in three miscarriages. Many of the things I once believed I could rely on disappeared, one by one. On countless sleepless nights, I thought of my grandfather, and of the pine tree in the corner of the park.

This Qingming Festival, after returning to the town to visit the graves of my grandfather and my mother, I walked into the park. I went straight to the deepest corner. The pine tree was still there. It seemed a little thicker, a little stronger. I placed my hand on its rough bark, my grandfather’s words echoing in my ears. And I realized that perhaps what he showed me back then was not “unchangingness,” but how, amid the inevitable turning of seasons, wind, frost, rain, and snow, one learns to root life deeply and retain the strength to keep standing.