Spring adorns herself in buds and blossoms, flowering vines curling up newly built telegraph poles, leaves awakening out of dreaming branches, moss as verdant as ever where moisture sits in pockets of shade and rock. Phoenix and I paint the inside of our drab hut with wildflowers, small irises and branches bursting with pink buds of cherries.

It’s deformed. Like the many babies that are born from hibakushas.

The grass came back only 7 days after the bomb destroyed everything on Aug. 6^th. There was a rumor that nothing would grow in Hiroshima for 75 years, so it was a welcoming surprise to see thick green tufts of panic grass, feverfew, knotweed, and sickle senna as invasive and persistent as ever, sprouting from the blackened mounds of debris. Soon green burgeoned in every grey crack and corner where there was soil underneath. Wildflowers grew out of ashes.  

Hiroshima residents who had evacuated to the countryside and soldiers who had been away fighting the war came back not only to destruction, but to delicate bluets peeking up through uncollected bones, morning glories already twining their way up still standing flagpoles, pigweed, yucca pups, marigolds growing in the bowels of decomposing cows, canna lilies rising from the sand fertilized by rotting flesh near riverbeds, purslane, burdock, ginger and sesame threading their way through the broken fabric of civilization.

I remember the morning a day nurse brought in an armload of canna lilies, with clusters of bright red flowers. She’d pulled them out of some wreckage, clods of earth still clinging to their roots, because she knew the bulbs could be boiled and eaten. But it was the bright ears of color that the patients hungered for, more than the plant’s promise of food, for the blossoms gave them hope, that the world would come back again, it fed their need for everyday commonplace occurrences that sustained their existence in the past. Looking out their windows for the first brushstroke of color against the white canvas of snow that had covered everything in sight during the long winters, those splashes of red were a source of courage and hope that spring was on its way, a new beginning. It connected them to ritual, and ritual connected them to life and community.

Soon cannas would be popping up in fields, at the marinas, poking their heads through the snow in their gardens, rubbing up against those valued summer vegetables that had replaced every ornamental flower in those lean years leading up to the end of the war.

“Okasan, look at this!” Phoenix brings me a daisy but it’s not a daisy. It has four centers, so instead of one yellow circle, it has four discs connected to each other in a row. Instead of petals, it has leaves growing all around that strangely elongated center. And the petals of the flower are growing up the stem where the leaves should be.

It’s deformed. Like the many babies that are born from hibakushas. Like the fawns from the surviving deer of Miyajima with no legs, or the calves born from cows with half a head.

Yet Phoenix isn’t aware of what a daisy should look like.

The world around him is as amazing as it was to any child born before the bomb.  What he sees is miraculous and new, and what he doesn’t see, is the destruction, because he was born into it, into the atomic age, to him this waste of war, the destruction of the world around him, is natural, all he has, yet what is so amazing to me, is what he chooses to observe in this new world, what he finds precious and what he perceives as beauty, is nature.

Who am I to say this daisy he presents me with is only deformed? It’s because I come from that other world where daisies only have one center and their petals revolve around that circle.