My grandmother's house smelled of the perfume of the flowers that grew in her garden, roses, carnations, chrysanthemums, gladiolas. The clavellinas and trinitarias adorned with their colors the entrance gate and the graceful daisies clustered around it.
A path of stones led from the fence to the entrance of the house painted in pink, my grandmother's favorite color. She said that color brought tranquility and harmony. And there was no way to convince her to change it. Year after year her son... my dad, would please her by painting the walls with some shade of pink she chose. My mother would help her cut flowers to put in vases and decorate the house with colors.
But what attracted me most about the house was a pond surrounded by reeds, where white and purple-flowered water lilies grew, with their large floating leaves and the pink lotus flower rising above the surface on a graceful stem that held it suspended. I would spend hours sitting in front of the pond, while the bees danced on the flowers and the pond reflected my image, that of a ten-year-old girl, with long black hair covering part of her face and big black eyes staring into the water, as if searching for something in its depths.
One morning in May, a very peculiar family with strange eyes and speaking in a language I did not understand came to the house next door. Later I learned from my mother that they came from a country called China, which was very far from here.
“And why did they come to live so far away?” I asked my mother”.
“You are curious Andrea!”, my mother said smiling. “I think that there are many people living in China and there is a lot of poverty.”
As my grandmother was a very friendly woman and liked to help other people, she quickly made friends with the new neighbors, the mother, father and grandmother of a boy my age who looked at me whenever I accompanied my grandmother to bring them some of the tasty food she prepared or some of the fruits from the trees in the yard: mangos, avocados, guavas and oranges. They would receive all these gifts with a bow, which I found very funny.
Chang, that was the boy's name, and I became very good friends, we went to school together, we played in the yard and in my grandmother's garden. I taught him the names of the flowers that grew there and he quickly learned to speak Spanish. The pond was our favorite meeting place.
