The Peach Spirit

At the western edge of Nandong Village stood half an acre of peach trees, left to a quiet young man named Lu Yan by his late mother. Among them grew one ancient trunk, thick as a man's embrace, which each spring buried itself in snow-white blossom. The villagers called it the Old Peach Immortal.

Lu Yan was a calm and diligent soul. Every deep spring he would sit by the tree through the night with a lantern, fearing that wind and rain might break its branches, or that careless children might climb them. His mother had once told him, "This tree is alive; do not neglect it." He had never forgotten.

One February brought days of cold rain. Yan feared the buds would freeze, and so he wrapped himself in a straw cape and broad hat and kept watch in the orchard for three nights. On the third, the rain stopped and a thin moon rose. Exhausted, he leaned against the trunk and dozed, and woke to a soft voice among the branches, like a woman humming low. He opened his eyes and saw, within the shadow of the flowers, a young woman in pale crimson, a peach bud pinned in her hair, her face gentle and unhurried, not quite of this world.

Startled, he rose and asked who she was, and why she had come at night. She only smiled, and with a gesture toward a wilting bud she whispered, "You have kept watch three days; the blossom knows your heart." From her sleeve a few petals drifted down and settled on the branch; the withered bud slowly opened again, dewy and whole.

After that she came on every moonlit night. Asked her name, she said Wan. Asked where she came from, she only laughed. Yan did not press her. They sat together on the stone step; she tidied his tangled branches, and he warmed a pot of coarse wine for her. Wan drank poorly, blushing at a single sip, and he never urged her. The bees hummed, fallen petals gathered on their shoulders, and the quiet was its own delight.

Curious villagers heard the orchard held something strange and came to peer. Yan would close the gate and turn them away. "My friend is shy," he said; "she leaves at the sight of strangers." They laughed at his foolishness and stopped coming.

Through the year the fruit hung heavy. Wan chose the roundest peach, split it with her own hands, its flesh red as cinnabar, and fed it to Yan. He tasted it, sweetness clear to the bone, and asked why no fruit on earth tasted so. "What is planted with the heart," she said, "tastes of nothing else." He said nothing, but understood she was no ordinary woman.

As autumn deepened the blossoms thinned and her visits grew few. One day she stood beneath the old tree, her face dim, and told him: "A tree's years are numbered. I was born of this trunk, and when it fails, I must go. If next spring you see new shoots on the old wood, that is my return."

He took her hand; it was warm and light, almost without bone. "When you leave," he said, "how shall I bear it?" She answered, "You have kept the tree as a friend, and the tree has kept you. Ours was a pure bond, need it last forever?" Then she melted into a clear wind and was drawn into the flowers, gone without a trace. That night the old peach shed every leaf.

Yan buried the fallen leaves at its roots and tended the soil year by year. The next spring the old trunk indeed put forth new shoots, more blossoms than before. On a moonlit night Wan returned, her sleeves as they had been, and they met as if no time had passed. Yet from then on she came and went with each season, and Yan made his peace with it, and did not complain.

When people asked why he never married, Yan only smiled. "I have a peach for a wife and the moon for a friend. What more could I want?"

[The Chronicler's Note]

Trees have no mind, yet the old peach could weave a bond untouched by desire; men have feeling, yet turn it to petty account. Yan kept one tree and gained a sweetness of taste and a promise of spring, and never regretted it, not from folly, but from knowing where to stop. The finest flavor under heaven lies not in rare delicacies but in what is planted with the heart; the truest affection lies not in clinging day and night but in meeting, season after season, with certainty. Those who grasp for fullness might learn from a single peach and an honest old man.