(Written by a student in Shanghai.)

          It's a quarter of the way into April, but it's snowing up north in China today.  We're enjoying the spirit of spring, but the weather needs to improve.

          The date for Tomb-Sweeping Day in our crop year is established by the solar system, but the government regulates our holidays, and we only got one day this year.  That holiday is also called our Memory Day and most of pay our respects to our deceased relatives at their tombs. 

          We want them to know how much we miss them, and afterwards - as we walk through a park or the countryside - we see how spring is proceeding and try to put ourselves back in a good mood.

          A total of 2.7 million people did that on April 4th.  That was the official Tomb-Sweeping Day - and there were eight hundred thousand the next day.

          My parents left us six years ago.  I think of them often - not just on that special day.

                                    ***

          The peony is our country's flower, and it blooms in April with large, variously colored flowers.  The two cities that always come to mind when we think of peonies are Leoyang and Heze, but Leoyang is also famous throughout the world as the former capital through nine dynasties.  I don't need to visit the two cities to see the peonies; I can view them in the Guji Garden or a nearby park.

          Guji Garden, built during the Ming dynasty, is famous for its beautiful, ancient buildings.  It's one of five very old gardens near Shanghai, and it has a peony that is one hundred years old.  I saw on TV that it recently bloomed with one hundred flowers, all of them red with a light, flowery fragrance.

                                    ***

          Shanghai and St. Petersburg have been friendship cities for twenty years, and I went through an exhibit of paintings about St. Petersburg's spring yesterday.  There were more than seventy of them, some of them representational, others quite modern, with a few in the impressionist mode.  I'd worked on gaining skills as a painter with my father as a mentor for about a year, and then had to give it up when I moved.  The exhibition reminded me of how happy I'd been.  I haven't painted for a long time.