Huanying! Welcome to Shanghai, China. The place of all the peculiarities. Where everyone have their own stories about the families living there, especially the Xu's. Their ancestral house that they own for many generations have an infamous garden w...
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The next morning dawned bright and sweet like candy. Timmy opened his eyes and stared at the bedroom ceiling, the same ceiling his grandmother had woken up to and stared at everyday of her life.
He turned his head and saw Mei and Tyler fast asleep, turned into each other. Mei had been through and done more than Timmy could ever imagine. That much experience, that much change, would devastate Timmy.
Or maybe, even as extraordinary as it was, it was life. Everyone had stories to tell. He looked back up at the ceiling.
Even his grandmother.
Mei said that Grandma Martha had gone to the beach. As shocking as that was, Timmy assumed she had gone there with her future-to-be husband but then Timmy began to wonder about those old photos of his grandmother before she married her husband, when she was a pretty young woman with a joyful smile.
The photos were of his grandmother with several different boys, all with the same looks of admiration on their faces. On the back of the photos his grandmother had written, In the beach with Thomas and At homecoming with Joshua. Then there was the one with his grandfather's name, Isaac.
His grandmother had a life, a life Timmy hadn't known about or even imagined. He had tried so hard to know everything about Grandma Martha to be everything she was but Grandma Martha must have sensed something in Mei, a kindred soul, with Mei's brightness and popularity. She gave Timmy the wisdom of her old age but she gave Mei the secrets of her youth.
Timmy didn't have a single photograph that someone years from now would see and think, That boy loved him.
He got out of bed and made breakfast for Mei and Tyler. It was a nice morning, lots of chatter and good feelings, no scent of anything bad in the air. Mei left for work by the back door, calling over his shoulder as he left, "There's a lot of apples out here!"
So Timmy took a box from the storeroom and he and Tyler gathered the apples the tree had thrown at the back door.
"Why did it do this?" Tyler asked as they walked to the garden gate in the bright, wavy mornng light.
"That tree had a hard time minding it's own business." Timmy said as he unlocked the gate. "We were all together last night and it wanted to be a part of it,"
The tree fluffed itself up when they entered the garden.
"It must be kind of lonely," Tyler replied.
Timmy shook his head and went to the shed for a shovel. "It's cranky and selfish, Tyler. Don't forget that. It wants to tell people things they shouldn't know."
He dug a hole by the fence while Tyler stood under the tree and laughed as it shed little green leaves all around him. "Look, Uncle Timmy, it's raining."
Timmy had never seen the tree so affectionate. Tyler was just innocent enough to be able to overlook the pall it cast. "It's a good thing you don't like apples,"
