notes on jacaranda season
// + bonus catalogue of squirrel pics
Seasons proceed by a peculiar logic in Mexico City. Summer has already come and gone, with its scorching noonday heat, unidentifiable allergies, and the overhanging threat of water cuts. As we enter June, rains fall and temperatures drop, delivering long-awaited relief; but it also marks the end of jacaranda season, the abundant flowering that holds both residents and visitors in thrall.
I wrote about the jacarandas for The Shanghai Literary Review, which is now available to read here. The essay came together in a fever dream, and I am grateful to friends Lesley Tellez and Beimeng Fu from Far & Near for their close reading during that early heady stage. It is a lyrical, fragmentary piece about wonder, about making a home, about the insistence to hold onto beauty even as change beckons. It is also, in a way, an essay about memory and forgetting.
I visited Mexico City for the first time in March 2014, an impulsive decision triggered by a bad breakup. I was 21 and had no clue where I would end up in a few months; I knew not that it was only the first of more bad breakups to come, and the spontaneous acts they would provoke. I booked my trip on a Monday and arrived three days later. The city was then still known as D.F., and I wandered around Zócalo and Tlatelolco, tested my haphazard elementary Spanish, tried tacos al pastor, wondered what the big deal was with a subdued neighbourhood called Roma. In my journal, in between berating myself for the dissolution of the relationship, I noted down my observations of the city: the crowds and the din, the “efficient, cheap” metro system, and the greenery: “wide, tree-lined avenues [w/ the occasional burst of violets/azaleas?]”
Eight years and some countries later, when I was given the opportunity to move to Mexico, I would recall the intuition that I’d had then, that I could maybe make a home here, someday. I remembered nothing of the flowers I could not put a name to; as the essay explains, it was a chance encounter that taught me to notice them again, and I eventually moved into an apartment with a view of a jacaranda tree — an incredible blessing I thank my stars for every day.
This last jacaranda season was my third since moving here, and it was only this year that I noticed that the flowers bring with them another seasonal occupant: the squirrels.
I was seated at my desk one weekend afternoon, writing away, when a squirrel climbed onto the window ledge not two feet away from my dangling legs, its little hands pressed against the glass, its face gazing intently up my skirt. I noted his particular features — snowy vest, chestnut patch on the back — distinct from its companion in the trees that day, perfectly chestnut-brown with a well-proportioned tail, the classic squirrel archetype. I named the first Tom (or Tomás), for peeping, and the other Theo.
As the weeks went by I realised the furry creatures outside my apartment were far more numerous, and varied, than I’d first thought. There were seven, eight, up to a dozen of them taking their turns scurrying about the trees, each with a different shade of fur coat and bushiness of tail, its own habits and proclivities. An entire ecosystem of families and friendships, established rivalries. I began to spend some minutes observing them every day, giving each squirrel a name. I became particularly fond of Bud, a miniature version (likely a sibling) of Tom, who loved to cup jacaranda petals in his little hands and hold them up to his face as he fed. And I never saw Theo again — I am not sure if he ever existed, if there really is such a thing as a perfect squirrel specimen.
Had I been oblivious to their presence all this while, even as their lives and little dramas unfolded inches away from my own home? I am a city girl through and through, woefully inept at giving nature its due attention; I also no longer trust my recollections, which are fallible and subject to the distortions of seasonal allergies. Had I known the squirrels before and simply forgotten, just as I had with the jacarandas?
This is the first city I have committed to, to being present for its seasons year after year without the impulse to run. I am just learning to cultivate a memory of a place that stretches across the cycles of time, like a cherished videotape to be rewound and reconsidered over the years, not a glittering reel of snapshots that flashes once or twice before vanishing into the void of forgetting.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons I write, about flora and fauna, the precise tonality of a heartbreak: it is an attempt to arrest time, to create a record by which to relive previous lives. So that come next year my attention can be fine-tuned and further enriched, instead of starting anew, over and over.