A quite naive article written for her

She seems to hate English and asked me to write this as a submission to her English class. I just shrugged and sent her this.

The Peach Tree in the Yard

Although the place I'm living now is quite a distance from where I was born and brought up and it's been several years since I last went back to my hometown, I've been thinking of the yard in front of the old house frequently and missing the peach tree planted by my grandfather in the yard.

My grandfather is regarded somewhat accentrical by his acquaintances. One of the reasons is that he planted a lot of trees in the yard after the old house had been built. It's generally a taboo in my hometown to plant trees in the yard because the Chinese character '困' which symbolizes a tree in the yard has a meaning of having a painful situation so it might bring bad luck to the family. However, he just laughed with a explanation that with the situation with a lot of trees, that saying doesn't work. So since I was born until I left my hometown after my grand father had passed away, I had always been able to live with these trees and had a lot of memories with them.

The peach tree grows by the side wall of the yard. Although it is not as near as the pear tree, which is just outside the window, from the house. It is the first kind of tree that I could specify when I growed up. I cannot find a reason for this but maybe it is because the shape of its leaves is quite different from others and the flowers is quite attractive to me.

There is an ancient Chinese poem describing the incomparable scenery when the peachblossoms are blooming and using it as a metaphor for deep and hot love. I didn't know the poem when I was that little but the scenery left me quite an impression. I still have a picture of myself standing under the tree full of blossoms. It seemed that I didn't need to reach the age of discretion to recognize its beauty.

I actually didn't eat many peaches from this tree. Most of the peaches got eaten by insects and birds before they got ripe and the taste of them is really not delicious. However I enjoyed them very much, as it's like an event for my family to pick peaches every year. My cousins would come to our house and we would be allowed to climb this not so tall tree by our parents to pick the peaches. There is much fun playing with them as well as climbing the tree and I was always looking forward to it.

The cat we once raised used to use the tree as a ladder to climb the wall beside it. After some time of self learning, it went from the root of the tree to the top of the wall quit easily. My family always saw it jumped between the tree and the wall. However I used to saw it fell off the tree once because when it uses its claw to climb the tree, barks of the tree crumbled off. It brought me a lot of fun on that cold snowy afternoon when I had to do some reading task assigned by my parents beside the window.

Years have passed and many more barks crumbled off the tree. I don't know how the tree is growing now but I wish if I were to go back to hometown sometime in spring, I could see a tree full of blossoms just as I saw them so many years before.