배대균 고문님의 수필 원고 입니다...자문님!

[허상회]

The Han of the Plum Blossoms

Bae, Dae-Kyun

The plum tree in the front yard has bloomed. Sixty years ago, when I joined the navy and was commuting from my family home, my father brought this tree home, and this year, as ever, it has flowered.

This plum tree carries a long story. A neighbor left it with us when they moved away, and before that, until Korea's liberation from Japan in 1945, it had been raised by a Japanese family. Even then it was already about sixty years old, and another fifty years have passed since, so the tree is now well over a hundred.xxjavascript:checkVirus('grpid%3D1Z3IG%26fldid%3DDo4x%26dataid%3D8%26fileid%3D1%26regdt%3D20260718130442&url=https%3A%2F%2Ft1.daumcdn.net%2Fcafeattach%2F1Z3IG%2F3a60be91836661861c00db918382658bf2612a29')

The plum blooms every year, and every time it blooms I remember how it suffered through the moves of my younger days. It kept me company through my three years in the navy, and after my discharge it traveled the long road with us—three years blooming in the yard of a rented house, then three more at a rooftop home. Conditions on that rooftop were so harsh that we nearly lost it for good, but my father brought it back to life. We moved twice more after that, and each time the tree fell ill. Fortunately, the plum I see this morning has been blooming for thirty years now in a sunny corner of the yard, and greeting it morning and evening is a joy.

The plum is hardy, and it makes me think of my father. He came from a farming village, worked as an elementary school teacher, and loved trees. Even as he was shuffled from one rural school to another, he never failed to tend the plum on weekends. He seemed to pour all the frustration and discouragement of those far-flung postings into caring for this tree. He had been a salaried man during the Japanese colonial period and knew the Japanese methods of raising plum trees. Whenever he came home from some distant country school, he brought a sack of compost, and whenever we moved, he never forgot to carry along a sack of the tree's home soil. Plum blossoms are as demanding to care for as they are marvelous. Moving season sometimes fell in midsummer, sometimes in the dead of winter, and each time he tended the tree as if his life depended on it. The stress of an aging teacher who never rose above the ordinary ranks, the strain of poverty as a parent of five children—he must have found consolation in pruning that tree. Coming home exhausted on weekends, he would walk the twenty-kilometer road carrying a garden tree in his arms, and before we knew it, the hedge around our house had grown into a small forest.

My father's plum is a white plum, and it blooms a little early. When sleet falls and cold winds blow, it sets its buds, bursts into full bloom within two or three days, and just as quickly the petals fall. It makes me feel the transience of life and calls up my father's past. Like a cactus in the desert, it endures brutal heat and cold to the very end, then one spring day it blazes open all at once and finishes its fate in a day or two—the very image of my parents, who both died too soon. My father, staking everything on a single plum tree of all things—that was the lonely figure of an aging schoolteacher, and it was the whole of our family of seven's poverty.

After retiring, my father immersed himself in Buddhism and passed away before reaching eighty. Since the Buddhist teaching is "lay it down, empty your mind," he tried to lay down even the han of his years of loneliness and poverty. My mother died barely past seventy, and I still see my father's pale face after he was left alone; the plum, as always, ended in falling petals. My mother, who used to say, "If only I could eat my fill of pork, just once..." died leaving behind the han of those onion dishes from the kitchen garden—and we children, too, were sick to death of those onions. On the anniversaries of my parents' deaths, I cannot lift my face.

The plum is wet with rain and, before I know it, goes on shedding its petals. Somehow it makes me sad. It brings back the sight of my father and mother sitting in a sunny spot in winter, warming themselves. The sweet potatoes we ate to get by—and my father, one deep winter day, asking how many of those frozen sweet potatoes were left—his words come back to me, vivid as ever.

The plum blooming in the yard—I turn my head sharply away and hurry out through the gate.