I walked down to The Garden Of Awakening Orchids at SW 3rd and Everett yesterday after church services were over and I'd sung my solo and eaten a mandarin orange (not during the service). The fog had finally lifted and while it was still cold the blue sky lifted my spirits, which were already pretty high after having belted out a series of high E-flats without too much difficulty, managing to avoid psyching myself out with my imaginary upper register limit of, oh, C-sharp usually.
The Lan Su Chinese Garden offers free admission this first week of the new year, and today's the last day so if the weather's good, I encourage you to spend your lunch hour there, if you work downtown. The persimmons are hanging like eggs on an Easter tree, and there are colorful stuffed dragons tucked into corners of the fluted rooftops, because starting January 23rd it's the Year of the Dragon. I tried to find a small dragon pendant to hang on my keychain but they didn't have any in the gift shop. I'll keep my eyes open for one, though I do still have the now-faded purple embroidered cloth dragon I bought in Japan when Mom and I were traveling around together, along with an aluminum sea turtle from Hawai'i and an enameled rooster from South America, keeping my keys separated into groups.
The garden was packed with people of all ages and languages, most with cameras, and it was hard to get space to take photos sometimes. But I found a few quiet corners where I could stand and just look at the shapes of the plants, some bare-branched and others evergreen.
I ended up sitting on the stoop along the side of the teahouse, in the sun, watching people and tracing the patterns of the stones in the pavement. A young Japanese girl was fascinated by the stones as well. "Tamago mitai!" she exclaimed. "Kochira, kochira, kochira ..." ("They look like eggs! This one, and this one, and this one ...") After about five minutes of that her mother agreed that yes, they looked like eggs, and wasn't it time to go look at something else?
They did look like eggs, in fact.
1 comments:
Oh, I know what my next garden project will be!
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