Winter, Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter.

Today, I walked around the Red Park for awhile. I was surprised to see that the lake had frozen. Now it's littered with bricks and rocks tossed to test the ice. It was cold, and there were few people there. All the businesses that normally sell eight treasure tea inside had shut down for the winter.

In spring I often spend my mornings in one of the painted, open-air corridors, sharing the early light with peonies and fresh yellow buds on trees that, before coming here, I had only seen in dreams. I sip tea (whose eight treasures are some dried mix of the following: bright red fruits the shape of raisins, dates, dragon eyes, jujubes, and flowers), and leave an empty notebook in front of me. I can only rarely think of anything to write--my time there is more of an emptying than a search.

One thing that I appreciate is how life is cyclical here. It looks drastically different in the winter and summer. I love the first day that those small winter clementines appear. The winter squashes that follow. The first day you can go to the park and bear a whole early spring morning in the cold. The fleeting summer mulberries, just like the ones that purpled our young feet in Knoxville summers. The first sweet taste of strawberries. I love when the square starts filling up with people again at night. And then I love, in its own way, when these things disappear. When the whole world turns back to waiting. To sleep. To tapping its watch, making sure the seconds are still ticking by.

Dance

Here, fruit and vegetable carts float through the city like shrimp trawlers. Some always go to the same place. Some are more dynamic, moving all day, loudly yelling the name of their wares.

"Corn! Corn! Corn!" and on, and on, all day.

Today, I passed one full of the tiny winter clementines that we have in our city, that seem to taste sweeter than anything I've had at home. They're not much bigger than a quarter, and for maybe twenty minutes a day I'll carefully make a cut with my pocketknife, peel and eat the tiny wedges one at a time like the sections of a clock. Left will be a pile of orange peels, the fragrance of oranges, a sweet acid taste, and a burning on my tongue like fire.

The man I passed was yelling as usual. "Oranges! Oranges!" And his three-year-old daughter was moving back and forth to the rhythm of it, the familiarity of it, swaying and precisely moving her hands in a dance probably thousands of years older than she is, or will ever be.