Chrystal Ho, Singapore
Spring Festival
The way spring arrives in a bed of snow: a first blade of grass. Where the rains fall year round instead, we nudge the pussy willow into a premature blooming. Despite the number of catkins I’ve witnessed split, I’ve yet to discover the true distance between the morning the first fault line appears on the shell around a catkin, to the hour the silken bud breaks free. How each shell, unlike the matte brown skin of a shelled peanut, falls cleanly away without disintegrating into powdery flecks, to form a perfect case that fits snugly back onto the buds, cloche hats made to measure.
Of the fistful of catkins I’ve deshelled, I’ve beheaded just three. The first time I petted a stray cat, its fur was coarser than a catkin’s. It takes days to persuade a cat to let you sink your fingers down to the firm resistance of its body. The elusive blink. Warm skin. That gentle pinch. Hours after the buds elongate into their bristlier selves, the branches will be upended from the tall painted vase. Tossed into the bin before the pollen scatters and interferes with the cleaning in just a matter of days, though a stray grain of golden pollen might just cling to the vase’s lip —
sticking out
the mouth of a rubbish chute:
green blade, hint of vein.
On mandarins
1. Each year there seems to be a distinct explanation for why the mandarins are sour. The incessant rains, or the frost that cuts through the orchards after a strangely warm winter.
2. Of my childhood: misshapen, still-cold mandarin peels, folded over with the waxen side out. My father, brushing the peel against my eyebrows with a light but firm hand.
3. To pick a box of mandarins, turn the fruit out and inspect each one for the dimples, pockmarked faces; no open wounds, minimal dark scars. When purchasing a box of mandarins, my father unwraps the pink paper that encases every fruit, before holding each one up to the dim fluorescent light. After requesting to switch out a few, he repacks the rest in a gradient of ripening color.
4. The season of mandarins imported from Jeju Island: always succulent.
5. If the mandarins are dried out, they say it has something to do with the lunar leap year. How the lunar calendar, charting how the moon waxes and wanes, no longer necessarily predicts when the mandarins should be harvested.
6. Those pruned mandarin trees that come up to just past the height of my knees, flanking doorways and lift lobbies, each one more orange than green, with that red satin bow tied around each pot, ends neatly tucked; alternatively, curled, then trimmed.
7. How does one induce a tree to grow so heavily laden with fruit that ripens in sync?
8. Perhaps one might be tempted to say that in her daily push and pull with the waves, the moon might have miscalculated the first day of spring, except for the leeks and the chinese cabbage and the rabbitfish and how the spinach, adapted to withstand the freeze, thaw, then freeze again of winter, continues to be at its very sweetest.
9. To my father I give thanks for my eyebrows. To the mandarins, their unruliness and abundance.
10. The way I’ve learnt to groom my eyebrows: pluck and trim. For a mandarin tree bred for prosperity, a pair of shears: cut, clip. In the absence of available technology to dry out a mandarin and still preserve the freshness of its original state, one might treat each fruit with some concoction of chemicals, before using wires to attach them onto the branches.
11. The way to eat a box of fruit deliciously from the start to the end is to eat whatever looks the most delicious first. If you pick one that looks most delicious from what’s left in the box, you will be picking the most delicious fruits until you finish them all.
12. As for the tree with the ripened fruit that no one eats? Amidst the pristine leaves: a forgotten mandarin, still green.
Chrystal Ho writes at the intersections of poetry and non-fiction. Her current work explores connections between the natural environment and her personal experiences growing up in urban Singapore.