The purple flowers bloom in the sky of memories…

Having lived in the countryside, talking about mua flowers, perhaps many people know. It is an annual flower from the end of January to the summer days, when the warm sunshine fills the sky and earth, every bush, every clump, all compete to bloom, showing off its radiant purple color. For me, mua flowers are memories, memories, peaceful nostalgia associated with the sweet, unforgettable childhood sky, even though those years have passed.

Located near the mountains, in the past, my hometown had many barren, abandoned hills. The land was not fertile, but here, mua flowers grew abundantly, each bush was very green and then after the Lunar New Year, about a few dozen days later, they began to bloom and bear fruit. Simple, rustic, fragile, but mua flowers are also resilient, able to withstand the harsh living conditions of nature. It seems that the more sunlight, the more flowers bloom and the more beautiful they become. The five-petaled flowers look like small pinwheels spreading out with a cluster of yellow pistils in the middle, as if wanting to show off their beauty to the earth, sky, and all things.

When we were young, on school holidays, we often came here to let the buffaloes and cows graze and then freely play and frolic in the peaceful, poetic space. While the boys played pretend battles, blind man’s bluff… the girls broke leaves to line the roots of the lush, shady bamboo trees nearby, then found pebbles to sit and play catch; sometimes picked mua flowers to string together into fake crowns to see who was prettier…

Mua not only has flowers but also fruits. Mua fruits are not big, usually only as big as a baby's finger, when ripe they are both astringent and sour, sweet and very delicious, especially the ripe ones whose skin splits open to reveal a cluster of purple flesh, very eye-catching. There were days when it was late afternoon, having fun, picking mua fruits and eating them until the tip of the tongue turned purple, the children lay right under the old mua bushes talking about all sorts of things amidst the strong afternoon wind and above the white clouds drifting with the wind towards the distant sky.

Along with many other plants and flowers, mua flowers are like close friends to us. When we grew up, some children picked mua flowers and pressed them into the pages of their books. There was a boy who used the image of mua flowers to write his first naive poems, wanting to give them to someone but then he was too shy to give them…

In my hometown, there is a fairy tale that tells that long ago, there was a young girl who sent her lover off to war. But then, in the middle of a fierce battlefield, the young man died for his country. After waiting too long, the young girl passed away, turning into a mua tree, which then bloomed purple flowers on the wild hills month after month, year after year. Poet Thanh Trac Nguyen Van has a poem called “Hoa mua” with very beautiful verses: “Long ago, in the afternoon, we two invited each other to play and pick lots of mua flowers/Mua flowers, you sold them, I bought them/Money was the fallen leaves at the end of the season, yellow and flying/Then I tied the leaves into strings/Knitted flowers into leaves, tied the day into the night/Knitted them into wedding flowers to give you/A purple wreath of your soft hair by the river bank…”.

I am not a poet but I really like mua flowers. That flower has become a nostalgia for me. Yesterday, from Nha Trang, I rode my motorbike along Pham Van Dong Street to Luong Son to play. On the winding mountain pass road, I suddenly saw near the roadside, lying next to a clump of reeds, a mua flower bush in full purple bloom. I stopped my motorbike to look at the flowers, and I felt nostalgic for a time...

HOANG PHU LOC

Source: https://baokhanhhoa.vn/van-hoa/sang-tac/202503/hoa-mua-no-tim-troi-ky-uc-e0d0d55/