Grandpa's bamboo grove taught me what quiet, lasting love looks like

Behind the old family house there is a grove of bamboo. Grandpa planted it when he was young.

According to Dad, it was the 1970s. Grandpa carried seven bamboo seedlings back from dozens of kilometers away and set them into the barren slope behind the house. The villagers laughed: "Planting that? It doesn't even fruit." Grandpa said nothing. He watered, he banked the soil. When the first shoots came up, he stood guard over them and let no one touch them.

Bamboo has a temperament: for the first three years you can hardly see it grow; the roots travel underground, secretly. In the fourth spring, tender shoots suddenly appeared all over the slope, and every year after, more of them. By my childhood the grove had gone green across the whole hillside. In summer you stepped in and cool air hit your face, cicadas roaring like rain.

Grandpa's love for the grove lived inside his list of "not allowed": don't dig shoots and sever the running roots; don't cut the young tips; no burning straw inside the grove. And yet he was generous: whoever needed poles for a melon trellis or strips for baskets could come cut a few mature stalks — he'd help choose them, help fell them. Bamboo, he said, is like people: "You protect it for three years, and it provides for you for decades."

I spent most of my childhood in that grove. Grandpa laid out a bamboo cot, lay there fanning himself in the afternoons while I counted stalks. He taught me which shoots not to touch, taught me to hear the sand-hiss of wind through the leaves, to tell hollow stalks from thick-walled ones. "The roots bamboo puts down — you can't see them," he said, "but they're all connected down there." I didn't understand. I took it for an old man's small talk.

The winter Grandpa died, a light snow fell on the grove.

The next spring the shoots came up all the same. Dad shouldered Grandpa's old billhook and walked into the grove — cutting mature stalks, thinning crowded shoots — his movements unpracticed but earnest. Like Grandpa, he said nothing. Like Grandpa, he forbade us from snapping things off carelessly. Like Grandpa, he gave the felled bamboo to the neighbors. Standing on the slope, watching, my nose suddenly burned: so this kind of love can change hands.

Loving a grove of bamboo is not the impulse of the day you plant it. It is the feet that walk back in, every spring, for years.

At Qingming last year I took my daughter home. It was her first time inside a bamboo grove and she tore up and down the slope, coming back with a single leaf in her fist. "Dad, who planted these?" "Your great-grandfather," I said. She tilted her head back and looked for a long time at bamboo older than her own grandfather.

The bamboo is still growing. And underground, where no one can see, the roots are holding seventy years of time together.