It Fell as Soon as the Wind Blew

The old locust tree at the entrance of the alley had lost its leaves again. Feng Chi squatted in front of the shoe repair stall and saw Granny Chen, who was wearing a blue shirt, playing with the roots of the tree with the tip of her cane. The crutch wrapped with a red cloth strip was tied with a five-cent coin from 1953. The face of the coin was engraved with small characters that had been faded by the years - 1962, spring, saved. A twelve-year-old boy who lost his adoptive mother learned to recognize the shape of the wind among the rags in a textile factory; a seventy-eight-year-old lonely man spent half his life guarding a locust tree. When the roar of the excavator crushes the morning light of the bluestone slabs, blue cloth shirts and the shoemaker's tool box block the tree roots, setting off a silent struggle for "retention." The wind will blow away the dead leaves, but it cannot blow away the memories of patches upon patches: the blue cloth clutched by the adoptive mother before she died, the half-faded jasmine flower on Grandma Chen's handkerchief, and the time that two generations guarded with thimbles, crutches and broken eggshells. This is a story about roots and perseverance. In the wind of urbanization, there are always people willing to be a stubborn leaf, letting the starlight in the annual rings continue to illuminate the gaps between steel and concrete. When the new buds of the spring equinox break through the frozen soil, the copper coins on the walking sticks jingle, and the wooden sign next to the shoe repair stall reads: "Feed the old trees for free - crushed eggshells and tea leaves can be used." And Feng Chi knew that some things were never retained by steel and concrete. They were the calluses on the palms of the hands, the stitches of the patches, and when one generation bent down, another generation quietly straightened their spines.