Saturday, May 4, 2019

Is the weeping willow still there?

"Do you have some old photos?" It's a call from a gallery that has been decorating exhibitions that reflect on the work activities in New York. I searched all over the studio and found a dusty album. In the early '60s, I noticed the first photo of my house built by a whole family on the outskirts of Seoul.

This is a photo of a front yard with luffa with my sister in midsummer. Back then, houseplants were rose moss, dark red cockscomb, autumn-flowering cosmos, crape myrtle, and marvel-of-Peru that formed black seeds.

There was no electricity in my house built outside Seoul's outskirts. It was his evening routine to polish the soot on the glass that was covered with lamp when my father came home. Even after many years, when I see incandescent lamps in which the filament lamps look transparent, the flashing a kerosene lamp is recalled.

My father was deeply attached to the small garden of his own home after war and evacuation. At that time, he obtained mint flowers and roses that were not easy to see on the outskirts of Seoul, brought them to planted them. Red roses, especially, used to be called red roses' houses by our neighbors as they were widely bred. Towards the end of the construction of the house, I planted branches of weeping willow that grow just by plugging into the ground in the spring. After a while, my family left for the U.S. after seeing a drooping figure that had grown big enough to cover one side of the house.

A few decades later, I asked my uncle, who helped build the house, about the old house. The neighborhood's turned into apartments, so it won't be easy to find it," he said, adding that he saw the willow tree remain beautiful until recently.

Our house was a small tile-roofed house next to the Yonhap filming station, where spectators flocked to the hills like clouds whenever there was an outdoor film shoot. I remember when the president of the film company took a movie shooting of 'Yi Soon Shin' starring Kim Jin-kyu, he came to my house where used to make North Korean-style food with sawdust, and took a sack of sawdust for a smoke screen that was needed to shoot a naval battle scene.

My husband, who has a lot of attachment to the garden like his father, walks in and out of Home Depot if he has to plant flowers when spring comes. This is the story of my husband's childhood home, which I have to listen to every year when spring comes. My husband, who grew up in the smell of dirt while eating yellow rice locusts in the fields in a noisy neighborhood with frog sounds, has a lot to talk about.

I have nothing to write these days because I grew up in concrete under excessive protection. I'm going to have to look back on my childhood memories like I pulled out of an old-fashioned projector that the sound of the film spinning.

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