Who’s the Leader?

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Freesias and the Imagination

The freesias uncovered a childhood memory.

The first year the freesias bloomed from the bulbs that I planted deep in the ground, I was really happy to see them gracing my garden.

The years pass; every spring the flowers bring beauty and its light, delicate scent, almost like baby powder.

Then one day when I looked at the freesias, a memory from long ago came to my mind.

I remember when I was a very young girl, a page of a nursery rhyme book made a big impact on me.

It was a picture of Little Miss Muffet. She was in her garden, and the detail in the illustration that really captured me was the colorful flowers drawn with little feminine faces.

The freesias took me on that long journey back, to that piece of art that had so captivated me. I saw that little flower faces again, with their big, twinkling eyes and petals for hats.

Maybe, the freesias reminded me of the shape of the flowers; or maybe it is one of the mysterious ways that the mind recollects.

And it made me think: in a wooden house in the tropics, a little girl sees a picture of English flowers. But in the imagination of a child, unsullied by limitations, her mind is free to travel wherever it wants to go.

And that power of the imagination, ideally, should never go away.

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The Companionship of Trees

It was fun to see the shape of the trunk and two small eyes of a baby elephant face on the cotton piece on the left.

The park was quiet. The walk, especially looking at the trees, was invigorating to both body and mind.

I gazed at the cotton tree, and the cotton looked like white gloves.
Then on the one on the left, a baby elephant face emerged. Can you see it, too?

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Cloudless Sky

An excerpt from my upcoming work:

Yunus could tell that the young man admired his mother, June, for all she had done for her children.

Yunus’ admiration for her also grew each time he stopped at their home. He admired her not only for her determination, but for the fact that she did not become bitter and still took pleasure in injecting beauty into her humble, everyday life.

He feared that he was falling in love with June. He knew that it wrong for him to have those feelings as he was a married man. When he imagined the faces of his wife and children, he felt a jolt of guilt. He would try to dismiss the situation by telling himself: “I’m just being silly.”

And yet he could not deny himself this feeling. It was like waking up to a cloudless blue sky: it made him feel vital, happy and he looked forward to the start of each day.

He wondered if June suspected that he had these emotions. He knew that he often stared at her when they were talking, and once when they were sitting on the sofa, without realizing it, he had moved his hand close to hers. She did not move for a while, then she abruptly got up and excused herself to fetch some snacks from the kitchen.

Yunus wanted more from their friendship. He wanted to hold her in his arms. He wanted to buy her presents; he felt that it was time that she was pampered by someone, instead of being the selfless one all the time.

But he knew that those desires could only be in his imagination. It was dreadful to be between two worlds – the real world of his home and the dream world of this pulsating new love.

But that was all he was entitled to at that moment.

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