Diary of My Country life-September 26th, 2026

The original source of this blog: https://www.lotusandmichael.com/blogs/diary-of-my-country-life

09/26/2026 Saturday 56-64F Rain 

The rainy season seems to extend from August to late September. Next week will be October, hopefully it will be drier. 

The rainy season isn’t something new to me. When I lived in Shanghai, every early summer it would rain continuously for at least one month. People called it “Yellow Plum Rain” because it was the ripening season of plums as well. It was worse than now since it was hot and damp, a perfect breeding environment for mold to set in.  

But perhaps also because of the rain, my vegetables grow very well. Like loofah, too many gourds are hanging on the vines that the weight eventually collapsed the trellis after another night of heavy rain.  I cut some ripe gourds off the vines in the morning to reduce the weight but didn’t repair my trellis. It is the end of the harvest season; the temperature at night dropped to the 50s. Several weeks from now frosts will start to fall, announcing the death sentence for my loofahs, and other summer vegetables. So I decided to leave the trellis alone and disassemble it before winter comes. 

When I harvested the gourds, I cut off a shoot by mistake. It was a healthy shoot, with a beautiful female flower blooming at the tip of a nice sized baby gourd. Feeling guilty, I brough the shoot indoors and arranged it onto a floral frog. 

“Nice display!” My husband saw it, praised, “Is it a loofah flower?” 

“Yes.” 

“Interesting. Where did you get this idea?” 

Where did I get this idea? I just simply didn’t want to waste a pretty shoot, or a pretty life; I am perhaps just a little more sensitive to Nature, to beauty; I might have inherited that part of DNA from my mother. 

My mother was born in a peasant family, though my grandfather was quite a figure in that village due to his governmental post. My mother never went to school for even one day because my grandfather believed that a girl wasn’t supposed to receive education. She learnt reading and writing from her aunt as a tradeoff of having nannied the uncle’s family for years in her teen hood. Then she went back home, became a village teacher; got married, and went to the town. She was a street vendor throughout my entire childhood; when I was fourteen, with a relative’s help, she and my father started to run a small mill producing semi-plastic products.  

Her life was full of struggles. Now looking back at those years, through all her anxieties and exhaustion, several small moments peeped out, which explained the tone of her nature, and mine. 

One day in the summer when I was about ten years old, my mother went to the countryside in the early morning to deal with some business, as she often did but without riding a bicycle. When she returned, it was late afternoon. I was playing alone at the pond near the house, by chance I saw my mother wearing her usual straw hat and floral blouse coming toward home from the far end of the valley; she was holding something in her hand. Then she drew closer—it was a lotus flower! 

My mother waved at me. I ran to her, took the flower from her hand. “Mother, where did you get this lotus?” 

She wiped the sweat off her forehead: “I had lunch at a friend’s house, outside where a pond of lotus flowers was blooming. I thought you might like it so I picked one.” 

It was a beautiful blossom: The petals were pink at the tips then gradually turned to snow-white. With a three feet long stem, the flower wasn’t fully opened yet since its heart and pollen were tightly hidden inside several central petals.  

My mother turned into the house, leaving me standing, stunned. That was my mother—in her bustling days, she still noticed the beauty; and once she got a chance, she would like to share it with her daughter, only because she thought I might like it. 

Yes, I did and do like it. It was the first lotus flowers in my life, after my mother had travelled a long distance on that hot day, by bus (which usually was very crowded to even stand straight) then by foot (miles of dirt road) on the bumpy, dusty country road under the blazing sun. The flower didn’t show any sign of wilting, so my mother must have shaded it from the sun with her straw hat! 

Another small thing was that one weekend in spring, my brother’s friend paid an unexpected visit to our house to discuss some homework matters with him. When they finally finished, it was already lunchtime. That day for some reason my mother happened to come back. “Join lunch with us!” My mother offered. Unlike the usual way, the friend accepted it (perhaps his parents weren’t home so there was no food waiting for him). 

“Oops! What shall I cook?” My mother figured. According to the original plan, my brother and I would only need to cook a dish of vegetables with rice for lunch as my father was away and my mother usually didn’t have lunch at home. Other than the vegetables, nothing else was available in the kitchen. And it would take too much time to go to the market. 

After a while, I smelled the fragrance of cooked rice, along with an unfamiliar sweetness. I went out of my room and met my mother in the kitchen. ‘Take the steamed banana to the dining table,” my mother asked, “then call the boys for lunch.”  

With a dish of vegetables, plus a plateful of bananas in the rice, that meal not only covered my mother’s embarrassment, but also had become an unforgettable experience to my brother’s friend—because months later he mentioned that lunch to us:  

“The steamed bananas were sooo good!” He smacked his lips, as if he tried to awake his memory, “The most delicious dish I ever had!”