its the semal tree. its a pure wonder. more than the lovely shade outside my kitchen window. in winter it dispensed off with all its greenery and suddenly turned into this brown skeleton with red, huge red, flowers. dotted along the entire structure of the tree(s). the flowers were a major hit with all the birds apparently for their sticky sweetness. i just loved the sight of those bunches of red from the heights of my staircase landing. and they'd plop down every once in a while and litter the entrance to the building and would bleed their stickiness underfoot. i managed to get a couple of the lucky charms out of it which give the first velvety hints of it being a cotton tree. we could sometimes sight never-before-seen birds on the tree. and then by the end of the cold season the flowers were all gone. and some greenness returned. and now with the leaves there are these random fruits on the branches. brown buds. just brown mysterious buds. that make you wonder where the famous cotton is that you associated the name of the tree with. and then suddenly one morning my mom pointed out a neat big flower of white cotton bursting out of one of those brown buds. the cotton was stacked like thick rose petals with a halo of fluff around it. and the next day it was all fluff and now its all rolling in the air just an inch above the ground. with numerous lumps of fluff out of each cotton fruit. each of these has a small brown seed in the center. and if you manage to catch bulk of a cotton flower you get a brown walnut-like skeleton within. its a pure wonder - the tree. and why all that nectar if the final produce was fluff? did the sweetness become these strands of white? something like the cobwebs we used to make out of squeezed orange juice from the peels i guess
