Flowering Trees: Cherry Blossoms / Cherëmukha

From my mother's front yard (in Virginia) this year

Years ago I was out in the Russian countryside with some friends, the youngest of which was five. I was still learning the Russian language and didn't know many of the words she knew, which confused her.

We came upon a flowering tree and I asked: "What's this tree called?"

She was stunned. "You don't know what cherëmukha is?"

It was like there was something wrong with me, or maybe it was my idea of a joke? For this little Russian girl, the cherry tree was akin to mushrooms, or camomile, or 22-kopek loaves of white bread: a part of the world in which she lived. The fact that I didn't know these things really marked me as the foreigner I obviously was.

I wonder, sometimes, whether there weren't many flowering trees where I grew up in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. Crabapples I remember, but not much else. We memorized the pin oak leaf and the maple leaf in science class in elementary school, and we picked apples in the late summer and autumn, but somehow flowering trees were not essential to my world.

I know that when I moved to Ohio I began to notice them in great numbers -- the Bradford pears which I hate (very stinky), the dogwood, the amazing redbud trees in the early spring. Some years they don't flower at all -- last year we didn't even have forsythia. Other years, like this one, when spring has been chilly, they last and last.

Only in learning a new language, and a new culture, do you come to realize what forms a part of your world and what does not. I had huge troubles in Russian with meat words. Having become a vegetarian at 17, I could never quite remember the difference between baranina (lamb) and goviadina (beef). And then about fifteen years ago, I began to eat fish. When I'm in Russia I regularly ask what kind of fish I am eating, but unless it is losos (salmon), tunets (tuna) or forel' (trout), I can't memorize the words.

The earwig

Sometimes, though, new phenomena enter our lives and the words just make sense. One year the earwig simply exploded in the Chicago suburbs. They were everywhere -- in our newspapers, coming through the walls... If you opened your mailbox, hundreds would fall out. It was awful. We learned a new word, earwig, and learned the etymology: the word comes from Old English ēare [ear] and wicga [insect], and the name may be related to the old wives' tale that earwigs burrow through the ear canal into the brain and lay their eggs there. Though it makes you shiver, the tale at least helps you memorize the bug -- and it's similar in Russian, ukhovërtka, ear-twister (I can just feel those bugs screwing their way into my poor brain...).

And now, here in Ohio, a new bug arrived maybe five years ago. I was teaching a Russian class, and one of my students was adept at using his phone to look up images. He discovered the Russian name for the bug (none of us even knew it in English, it was so new): nashchitnik. Or at least I think that is what he said. (Can't find it online -- I am not so good with the Russian internet...)

It was definitely related to the shape of the bug; we call them "stink bugs" because when you crush them they stink, but they look just like a shield, or shchit. And though they drive me crazy (our house really has been invaded), they remind me of something poetic rather than that creepy crawly feeling I get when contemplating the ukhovërtka.

In the very first monument of Russian literature, the Lay of the Host of Igor (unless, of course, it is an 18th century forgery or mystification, but that's a topic for another day), the text reads:

The sons of Russia spread out their scarlet shields seeking for themselves honor and for their princes glory.

I still remember these words from reading the text almost a quarter of a century ago in graduate school. "Seeking for themselves honor and for their princes glory" was an old-style mnemonic device as in oral poetry, like the "fiery-headed Menelaus" or the "rosy fingers of dawn" from Homer's Odyssey: a way for the storyteller to organize his tale, a kind of refrain.

Those words from the Lay of the Host of Igor also resonate with the old Spartan legend of the wife who sent her husband to war: return with your shield or on it.

In Russia, too, this expression is well-known: s shchitom ili na nem. i.e. either victorious or dead.

For language learners, having that hook really helps, whether the smell of cherry blossoms in the spring to fix the word in your vocabulary, or the literary works, legends, or sayings that act as mnemonic devices.

Then again, is the Lay poetic, or is it in its own way depressing? As a commentary on contemporary events, the Spartan slogan, and the Russian epic tale, are hardly cheering. I'd rather think about bugs -- or flowering trees -- than war any day, even if they are stinky.