Autumn in me

My autumn began with my grandmother's "complaint": "August sun is so hot that it burns grapefruit", "what kind of sun is this, it's like a firefly"... That very typical August sun, sometimes very gentle, sometimes fierce and bright, sometimes so hot that it feels like a firefly. The sun seems to still regret the burning of the remaining summer. However, at night the weather is pleasant and cool as if it had never been capricious during the day. Then suddenly there are the rustling breezes...

My autumn is the season of grapefruit. The grapefruit trees in my grandmother’s garden are full of fruit, round and juicy, with pink skin. August grapefruit is the most delicious and beautiful, with golden grapefruits hanging all over the branches like moons. She saves the biggest and most beautiful ones for the Tet fruit tray, and picks the rest for us to eat, to entertain guests, or to sell gradually.

My autumn is the season of ripe guava, not the big guava variety like now, but the small variety, smooth skin, yellow or red flesh, the guava fragrance permeates the small alley. The “guava fragrance wafting into the cold wind” that poet Huu Thinh mentioned, perhaps only children in the countryside like us know, sometimes intense, sometimes faintly light, as if there, as if not in the breeze. Those ripe, fragrant, sweet guavas are an unforgettable childhood gift.

My autumn is the season of green rice. Only adults are fussy about pounding green rice marinated in lotus leaves for the Mid-Autumn Festival or selling it at the market. As for us kids, we make our own roasted sticky rice to bite into, which is easy to make and quick to eat. When the sticky rice is harvested, it is still fresh, we ask our parents for a bunch, thresh it, and roast it ourselves in a cast iron pan. The sticky rice grains only swell and crack, not spreading out like when the rice is dry, so it is very fragrant. Just like that, we have a snack that is both crispy and fragrant.

My autumn is the season of star apples. The golden ripe star apples are beautiful as paintings, inedible because they are usually very astringent, but we children cherish them like treasures. We carefully weave baskets to hold the star apples with wool and sedge, carry them everywhere, inhale their fragrant scent, and hang them at the head of the bed when we go to sleep. Who knows, in our childhood dreams, there was never a child who dreamed of a girl coming out of a star apple, bringing miracles like in a fairy tale?

My autumn is the fragrant scent of areca flowers falling in the summer, the sound of kite flutes whistling in the middle of the night, the season of the shimmering moon in fairy tales... That autumn is familiar in books, in poetry, in the similar memories of many people, but to me it is always a personal feeling that cannot be confused, cannot fade because it is the emotions, the nostalgia, the memories that have passed in me, for a time.

My hometown is now a city, with concrete village roads, towering high-rise buildings, and colorful lights shining all night long. The moon seems different from before, quiet and distant. Where are the autumn nights with the moon shining brightly with the shimmering, magical, and ghostly areca palms, the bosom friends sitting together watching the moon and chatting? Where are the moonlit games, singing nursery rhymes, playing games like "dragon snake up to the clouds", "leech turtle release", "blindfolded goat catching"... of children like us in the past? The scent of guava is also different now, no one plays with the star fruit anymore, the bamboo fences and areca palm rows are gradually disappearing... But in me, the memories of autumn in my hometown are always sparkling and brilliant as if they have never changed.