March 29
I walked to the Tidal Basin during my lunch hour. The height of blossoms starts today and continues for the next three or so, yet the weather gurus predict rain and even (horrors!) a wintry mix. The blossoms may survive the elements, but who knows, so I walked over there. I work a walk from the cherry blossoms; how can I not? They make an almost indescribable tableau, so lovely you want to somehow keep it, make it last forever.
Blossoms framing blossoms
It’s hard to find worthy words for the scene without being trite. The blossoms are wonderful. The blossoms are beautiful. The blossoms are lavish and lush and spectacular. They are even, to finally use an over-worked word appropriately, amazing. What’s so wondrous is the sheer volume of blossoms. It’s like clouds of whitish pink have settled on thousands of cherry trees ringing the Tidal Basin and beyond. Perhaps a cosmic spatula smeared thick, white icing on branched cakes. Or maybe, some great seamstress wound yards upon yards of fluffy, cottony cloth, bolts and bolts of it on scores of outstretched limbs.
Lavishly slathered billows of blooms
Standing in the midst of such grandeur, you want to keep the sight, to hold on to the blossoms, to make this moment and this scene and this feeling last longer. I think the Camera Per Capita Per Square Foot (CPCPSF) rate is one of the highest in the nation, and possibly the world, during the Cherry Blossom Festival. It seems like everyone is carrying at least one camera, snapping this and clicking that. The likelihood of ending up in some stranger’s set of pictures from the cherry blossoms is pretty high around here. Everywhere you look, another mind-bogglingly beautiful scene waits to be imprinted on film or on a chip, mega, giga, and probably terabytes of blossoms.
...framed by a horticultural wonder.
I especially enjoyed watching a painter, her canvas propped on an easel, palette arranged with globs: white, pink, mauve and more, of paints she abracadabraed into cherry blossoms on canvas. More interesting than the painter were all the people watching and photographing her. I took a picture just so I could write this sentence: I photographed people photographing a person painting. I’m thinking I even saw, hoping actually, a kindred shutterbug actually photographing the photographers. If so, I can write: I photographed a person photographing people, photographing a painter.
...photographing painting a picture.
How like me, how like most people, to want to do whatever it takes to try to hold on to all of this. Without thinking, (of course not thinking, who’s thinking when there’s so much feeling to be done, reveling in the lavish glory of these blossoms?), we all are snapping away, clicking our cameras, wanting so much to keep it for awhile, maybe forever. I don’t blame me or us, but it ain’t gonna work. The blossoms are a gift from the trees, from nature, from God, to enjoy for a while before they, like most beautiful things, go away.
Supplicants in the sanctuary
Scores of people walk along the tidal basin’s edge, yet everyone is quiet, speaking in whispers and respectful voices, mostly, as if we stood in some holy place, a cathedral or temple or something. Actually this place is holy in the sense of meaning unique and set apart for special reverence. Within sight and sound of the city, but separate from it, here is a momentary haven and reprieve from bad news and worry and hate. You can’t blame us for wanting to hold on to that, photograph it to distraction, yet how much more of a reprieve would we get if we just put the camera away for a spell and simply looked at the blossoms?
A Monumental Display
