When You Were Absent

When You Were Absent

D ecember is one of the loveliest months in Hong Kong. Nearly every day is golden. Our home seemed especially beautiful as I looked out to one side and saw the hill with the green pines pointing to the blue sky. There was a row of pines that marched up the hill like sentinels. At dawn they were silhouetted against the brightening sky, and through the night the hours rose silently over them like one gigantic chronometer of planets and constellations. To the south was our sea-mare nostrum-rimmed at its base by spreading emerald. Sometimes there were fishing lights, and sometimes it was the mirror of some lazy junks or the skimming white swanlike beauty of a passing river ship. Again there were the jeweled dragon flies, the golden flash of a bird's wing in a tree below-the turquoise spot on a butterfly, the fluttering autumn leaf that was a monarch moth. These, and again, my room full of gold and amethyst chrysanthemums with the sunlight pouring through the windows in the winter warmth-these, I say, were my gems, locked away in the bombproof treasury of my memory. As a miser I can take them out and tum them over without fear of theft. I saw my gold in Lourenco Marques. The sapphire sea and crystal stars returned to me in Durban. Here again is a fragrant opal in a South African rose, and a friend, on my wedding anniversary, gives me a Crown Devon vase-similar to one I left behind! My sons have been brought to me from far Chefoo and my daughters are here at my side. My kind husband brings me flowers and a jar of olives, and a jade green brush and hand mirror set to take the place of what some looter is now using.

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