The purple flowers bloom in the sky of memories…

Having lived in the countryside, there are probably many people who do not know about mua flowers. 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 very resilient, able to withstand the harsh living conditions of nature. It seemed that the sunnier the flowers were, the more they bloomed and the more beautiful they became. The five-petaled flowers looked 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 feed the cows and buffaloes and then freely played and frolicked in the peaceful, poetic space. While the boys played pretend battles, blind man’s bluff… the girls broke leaves to line the shade of the lush and shady bamboo trees nearby, then found pebbles to sit and play catch; sometimes they picked mua flowers and strung them 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 cracks open to reveal a cluster of purple flesh that is very eye-catching. There were days when it was late afternoon, playing, 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, the mua flower is like a close friend to us. When we grew up, some children picked mua flowers and pressed them into their books. Some boys used the image of mua flowers to write their first naive poems, wanting to give them to someone but then were too shy to give them…

In my hometown, there is a fairy tale that tells that long ago, there was a young girl who saw 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 "Mua Flowers" with very beautiful verses: "Long ago, in the afternoon, we invited each other to play and pick lots of mua flowers/Mua flowers, you sold, I bought/Money was the fallen leaves at the end of the season, flying yellow/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 soft hair on the riverbank...".

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 side of the road, 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/