About drying yarn in the May sun

This season, flocks of butterflies flutter like the wind, spreading yellow and white colors throughout the countryside. Many pairs of smooth, powdery wings are placed on the summer girl's hair, faintly appearing among the beautiful flower slopes.

Perhaps each flower of the country is responding to the call of the season, so the path to the sunny porch is suddenly filled with a sky of colors and fragrance. Along the fence of the house next door, the purple afternoon flowers bloom passionately as if wrapping up the deep purple afternoon shadow, evoking the color of the shirt of someone in their twenties who had made a date. Bougainvillea and butterfly flowers follow the rhythm of the wind, falling under the feet of the past season. At the end of the path home, the purple flower petals that have waited for so many days to send their dream of purple memories fall on the pages of the student's yearbook. Amidst the slopes of memories, the red-eyed royal poinciana leaves still have tears of many seasons of separation. It seems that when immersed in the bright summer sun, those flowers become even more intense and proud.

In the middle of the sunny season of May, my mother spread out a tarp in the yard to dry the plump golden rice grains after the harvest. The yard seemed to be covered with a thin, golden coat soaked in the honey-colored sunlight, glowing in the shimmering afternoon light. My mother's shadow stirring the rice blended into the shadow of the countryside, the tip of the rake like the teeth of a comb drawing graceful, curving lines. In the scent of the sunlight, I could also detect the elegant, fragrant smell of dried rice, a smell that always evoked an indescribable feeling of love for the backs drenched in tears of hard work and hardship.

Mom also dried a bunch of green beans and peanuts from the fragrant garden. Before that, Mom had peeled off all the dry outer shells of the green beans, then diligently sat and winnowed them in the wind. White dust covered the hem of Mom's shirt, the worn-out brim of her conical hat, and even her thin cheeks dotted with drops of sweat. The dust stained the square of afternoon sunlight across the old bricks, spilling down onto the steps with Mom's worn-out silver sandals. I wondered how many layers of worldly dust had stuck and stayed on Mom's hair, until one day it turned into the color of May? Everyone eventually realized that on their parents' hair were strands of time as cold as frost. Hidden in the pouring sunlight was Mom's hair, which had lost its green mark for many seasons.

Outside, the May sunlight is drying the lichen spots on the rotten mango tree trunk, the wood ear mushrooms that grew from the previous rainy season. Drying all the old sadness in me, warming the bag of memories that are sobbing in my heart. All hardships will pass as if life has arranged everything, in the end I just want to sit down on the porch and drink a sip of hot tea, like drinking the leisurely white clouds. Sometimes I suddenly long to hear my mother's footsteps coming home, at the same time the grass puppies run out, wagging their tails happily.

Yesterday afternoon, as quiet as a folk song, my sister sat gently combing my mother’s hair. The sound of cicadas still lingered throughout the vast sky of flowers and grass outside the sparse fence and bamboo clumps. Each streak of May sunlight kept spreading in the quiet, swaying wind of the fields, intertwined with nameless longing…

Source: https://baophuyen.vn/sang-tac/202505/ve-hong-soi-nang-thang-5-9ab2194/