I have wavy hair and, as such, the rainy season of Japan is the bane of my existence. It seems no matter how much moisture I pour into my hair, it is always frizzy during this season of clouds, rain and humidity.
As such, the only part of the rainy season I remotely look forward to is hydrangeas. Japan is covered in hydrangeas around this time of the year, with bushes of them cropping up everywhere you look. They grow here the way dandelions used to grow back in America.
Because I love them so much, especially the blue ones, I decided to try my hand at having a couple in a container. I bought one last rainy season and then watched in growing horror as it dropped all of its flowers and proceeded to die.
At least, I thought it was dead. Mostly because I refused to simply throw the container away, I continued watering the remaining sticks that remained as winter settled in. Hydrangea are not exactly cheap, so I had a vague hope that maybe the hydrangea had left some seeds behind in the soil, and maybe those would give me back my beloved flowers.
Perhaps in testament to how highly unobservant I am, it wasn’t until late winter that, while visiting a vast park attended to by professional gardeners, I noticed their hydrangea bushes looked exactly like mine – dead. When I finally looked around at where I had remembered hydrangea bushes to be in my neighborhood, I realized every hydrangea bush looked dead. It looked like someone had burned the poor bushes to the ground.
This gave me overwhelming hope that maybe, just maybe, my little blue hydrangea bush was still somehow alive. A quick Internet research confirmed that it was merely dormant.
Sure enough, while the rain continues to drizzle down and my hair continues to betray me, I get the pleasure of looking out my little window and seeing a beautiful blue hydrangea bush every day. It’s not a bad view at all.