When the April heatwave came, my mum sent a WeChat video from Malaysia of an evening downpour. You can’t see the rain, only the effects of it: a gasp from her mouth and a yellow flame tree reflected in the wet, shaking.
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I see a yellow blur from far away and walk closer, disbelieving. Here is a kōwhai tree on the edge of a garden in North London, in full bloom. For a moment I do not breathe air, I breathe yellow, I breathe myself home.
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My phone is vibrating, telling me: You have a new memory. Here is a stream of pictures collected into an album, all taken somewhere far away. Home is not a place but a string of colours threaded together and knotted at one end.
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Kōanga, springtime, often synonymous with kōwhai, yellow. In another time and place, I watch the hills above the house turn gold.
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When people say things like the hottest April day in sixty years it becomes necessary to make note of the bright heat of the concrete, the fallen magnolias with their shy blood roots, the fingernail kōwhai blooms curling translucently like discarded chrysalids. Be still. You have a new memory.
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Ua kōwhai, light spring showers, or: kōwhai showers — when the world becomes a sea of yellow. I now know it can happen anywhere, even somewhere cold.
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In her childhood bedroom my mum slides back the mosquito net and holds her phone against windowpane, recording the rain.
