Trees

My entire life, I have been travelling to Japan and Singapore on an annual and biennial basis respectively. I was three months old when I first travelled to Japan, and I was about a year old when I first visited Singapore. Both of my grandparents live in the city and trees are not necessarily as common as they would be in the suburbs of cleveland, but pockets of nature exist all around both cities. Every place we go to, we create memories of that place, and each time we travel back to those places, we develop a stronger feeling of nostalgia and attachment to those places. We begin to associate specific things with each country, the weather, the smell, the view etc. Every time that I travel to these cities, I am always excited about the food, the buildings, the public transport, and the trees. I think there is magic in natural diversity, and I am extremely grateful that I get to travel to completely different environments. That are separated from each other by a vast ocean. The grass is a lighter shade of green in Japan, and it has thicker blades in Singapore, the crows in Japan are 1.5x bigger than they are in America, and monkeys roam the streets of Singapore threatening your groceries, but my favorite marking of each ecosystem that I come across, is the trees. The trees that loom over the cities, the trees that I stare at from inside the car when we drive from the airport to my grandparents house. It is the marking of a different place, and almost a different world. I think it is fascinating, beautiful and nostalgic. Trees are extremely important in every ecosystem as a source of oxygen, and they have become a staple to almost every biome. That is why, just like cuisine, where each region has its own food staple, each environment has its own brand of trees. It is like an aesthetic developed through evolutionary processes. There is beauty in trees and their ecosystems, but also their application in society. I love to see the gingko trees that surround the local temples that we visit and the Japanese pines that surround the more boujee temples. I love to see the broad leafed mahogany trees that cover the highway just outside my grandma’s condo and the trumpet tree that provides the much needed shade for the neighborhood basketball court. Each tree is completely different and the different colors and shapes are the result of millions of years of evolution and adaptation to these environments. I think we fail to recognize these beauties and the nature of their evolution when we are isolated to one biome, so I feel extremely grateful that I get to experience not only different cultures, but different environments every time I visit my grandparents.