Colours of Winter

I woke up at 10:00 to a bright sky. I forgot the curtains last night.

After eight hours’ sleep, I still felt exhausted by the five-day holiday to my father's hometown. 

At 10:30 on this twenty-eighth day of December I decided to look for winter that seemed to have lost its way to this disturbed city. Or, the city was at a loss.

While stuffing myself with a lousy breakfast at the McDonald’s, photos of autumn leaves popped up from the junk messages on my phone. Red maple and yellow ginkgo leaves they were, beautiful of course. Yeah, friends had been talking about the huge crowds of people gathering around the strips of maple trees with their red leaves last year. The scene was on the television too; not this year though. Well, I could do that, to look for the red leaves and the long waited winter.

To look for these red maple trees was no problem. They were planted intentionally in selected places and their number was counted. They are the icons in the winter countryside. But why are they?

The first three maple trees were disappointing. But, I was not disappointed. I never really like the way they were planted in the countryside. Actually, they are not even maple but Chinese sweet gum.

Yet, in the end, I found the true colours of winter that belonged to this city.

Winter has come and it touched my heart on this twenty-eighth day of December.

The colours come and go and very often we are not bothered to look at them or think of their ever existence. Nonetheless, they do come with winter and change as the sun rises and sets. It is nothing new but forever changing till they return to where they come from.