The100Gs | 100 Stories About Givenness "003_Hydrangea"

A little past 9:30 PM, someone knocked on the door. I opened it in my pajamas, fresh from the bath, to find my landlord who lives upstairs.

"A neighbor gave me some hydrangeas, so please take as many as you like. Leave the rest in the green bin for compost collection."

As she said this, she pointed to the pile of hydrangeas stacked in the garage. It was a mountain of hydrangeas, more than I could carry—enough to fill a lifetime's worth of stationery if I pressed them.

The garden of that "neighbor" is so surrounded by colorful hydrangeas that it could be called a hydrangea palace. Perhaps pruned to keep the bugs away, the hydrangeas, cut clean from their branches, lay quietly on the asphalt under the deepening summer night.

There was no way I could decorate my small one-bedroom basement apartment with all of them. I chose about ten, put them in water, and displayed them in my room. The remaining hydrangeas waited for their fate as if they had given up.

They were still blooming. Still alive. A lush, overlapping gradation of colors. Lovely flower heads, each looking similar yet none identical in shape. But I couldn't keep them here.

With a heavy heart, I gathered the mountain of flowers, put them in the green bin, and closed the lid. That night, for some reason, I couldn't sleep.

When I woke up the next morning, I went outside immediately. The moment I opened the lid of the giant bin, I felt a warm, stuffy air. The breath of the hydrangeas. The flowers were still there, in the same state as last night, still fresh.

Fortunately, only mowed grass and plants had been put in the bin beforehand, so I gathered up the hydrangeas. Then I went back to my room, filled two large buckets with water, and placed the flowers in them.

I wrote "Free flowers - Please take one!" on a sign with a marker, placed it in the front yard, and left. The restlessness in my chest finally subsided.

When I returned home in the evening, the buckets were almost empty. Oh, I'm glad. The owner had said, "They'll wither in a day or two anyway," but I couldn't bring myself to be complicit in burying those miraculous colors and shapes, those things still holding life.

The hydrangeas I decorated my home with also withered and died little by little after that. A fleeting expression of life. But I fully savored the hydrangeas that were taken from the buckets on the street that day, held in people's arms, and bloomed under their respective roofs.

2025.08.01
🕯 G #003 | Lit


【The 100Gs | 100 Stories About Givenness】
100 scenes revolving around G, lighting up the "connection of life."
A small light is lit with each story,
And by the 100th story, the world will surely become G... perhaps.


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