Chinese Version 09-14-2023, Thursday, Sunny

When my parents came to visit us in the United States during April 1997, we were living in an apartment near 19th Avenue in Daly City, close to Golden Gate Park. The Botanical Garden in Golden Gate Park was free to enter at the time and my mother, who loves flowers, especially liked the flowers and plants in the park. Unfortunately, since I was busy working as a newly hired software engineer in a small startup company and had a long commute from Daly City to Novato City in Marin County, we couldn’t visit Golden Gate Park very often.

At the end of 1997, after my family moved from Daly City to East San Jose, I changed jobs to work at Lattice Semiconductor, a programmable chip hardware company. Since I was working in a hardware company as a software developer, my workload was much lighter now as the delivery cycle of software products was driven by the hardware chip delivery cycle which is usually slow. My father liked outdoor activities and my mother and I liked flowers, so I started to drive my parents and my daughter to the nearby parks to walk around and to see flowers almost every weekend. I still remember when my mother first walked in Overfelt Garden Park, she immediately pointed to the evergreen trees on our left side and said: “These are osmanthus trees. We can come here to smell the fragrance of osmanthus in the autumn.” It was my first time seeing osmanthus trees in the United States and I thought they were short, less than two meters high, unlike the tall osmanthus trees I saw in China before.

During the next autumn, in 1998, we went to Overfelt Park just to smell the fragrance of osmanthus. Although the silver osmanthus flowers were sparse and could not fill the air with fragrance, my mother stood among the osmanthus trees, putting her nose close to the silver flowers and said with a smile, “It smells very good!” This scene is engraved in my memory with the joy of my first autumn with the fragrance of osmanthus in the United States.

In November 1998, after my son was born, my mother went back to China alone due to illness and my father stayed with us to help me take care of my newborn son and kindergarten daughter. I often drove my father and two children to Overfelt Garden Park, as it was very close to our home. I remember the purple morning glories blooming at the entrance of the park in summer and the aggressive geese by the lakeside in spring.

In the summer of 2000, before my daughter entered third grade, my family moved to South San Jose for a better school district. After moving, I stopped visiting Overfelt Garden Park and the name of Overfelt Garden faded from my memory.

In the summer of 2018, I moved from San Jose, California to Waltham, Massachusetts to accompany my daughter’s Ph.D. study in Brandeis University. While talking with my son who lived in San Jose, California over the phone, I suddenly heard of Overfelt Garden Park again, because my son liked to play Pokemon Go and there were many Pokemon in Overfelt Garden Park. I remembered the sweet-scented osmanthus in Overfelt Garden and started to look for the sweet-scented osmanthus while enjoying the gorgeous autumn colors in the East Coast. Unfortunately, I never saw nor smelt the sweet-scented osmanthus.

In September 2022, after returning to Silicon Valley in California from Massachusetts with my daughter’s family, we lived in an apartment for a few months. I happened to see several huge trees with silver osmanthus blossoms across the street from our apartment. The trees were taller than a one-floor house. I frequently walked there to smell the sweet-scented osmanthus which reminded me of the osmanthus trees in Overfelt Garden Park again.

In early 2023, my daughter’s family moved from the apartment to a house in East San Jose. In September 2023, I visited Overfelt Garden Park again for the first time in more than twenty years to try to see and smell the sweet-scented osmanthus. Unfortunately, seeing that the sweet-scented osmanthus trees were gone made me sad, as the trees were an object far away from my hometown which reminded me of my late mother’s love for flowers.

I suddenly wanted to see the forest of osmanthus and smell the fragrance of osmanthus which filled the air, such a scene can only be found in Xindu Guihu, Sichuan in my memory.

My longing for the massive osmanthus scene was finally fulfilled in October 2024.

Seeing the flowers suddenly made me remember the time my Mom and Dad visited Overfelt Garden in the United States and made me smile. Seeing the flowers again brought me the same happiness I felt back then.

Postscript:

Before returning to China at the end of September 2024, through an alumni from Sichuan Normal University, I invited Sichuan’s gold medal tour guide Jiang Yu to plan a few days of travel for my aunts and uncles from my mother’s side in Zigong. I thought of Xindu Guihu, so I put this place on the itinerary. Unfortunately, my aunts and uncles did not want to stay overnight outside, so this plan fell through. Finally, I accompanied them on a one-day tour, chartered a six-seater business car for 1,000 yuan, and went to Lizhuang, Shunan Bamboo Sea, and Yibin.

The autumn colors in 2021

The White Mountains in New Hampshire:

The Flume Gorge in New Hampshire:

The North Bridge Conccord in Massachusetts:

The Gibbet Hill in Massachusetts:

In 2022, I encountered the silver osmanthus huge trees.

After my parents came to the United States, we moved from Daly City to East San Jose. All the memories and thoughts were written here after I read my late mother’s limerick (1998).

I have a long and interesting history of playing Pokemon Go with my children in San Francisco and in Boston here

In 2016, I had not thought of enjoying osmanthus in the golden autumn, but I enjoyed the of tasting golden osmanthus flowers in the golden autumn, as I had dried osmanthus at home. This is the story