Springtime = Shearing

In Korea, springtime is the season of shearing. Sharing, you mean? No, shearing.

Coming back from a week in the states, I barely recognized my students and co-workers because everywhere I looked I saw new hairdos. Bobs, crews, mullets, you name it. (Anything goes here.) Even the forlorn spaniel that lives in a blue plastic dog-house in the gas-station adjacent to the school was shaved.

I went for a run around the nearby man-made lake (the one around which once, during the winter, I ran 25 times in the dark). The limbs of the trees lining the pavement were lopped, like hands reaching towards the sky with fingers severed at the first knuckle.

Pruning is a drastic and vicious art here; in the spring the plants have their tops and middle removed. I never caught the act in progress, I am only witness to the amputated trees and shrubs.

The weather is beautiful now, though.