Even with all my best efforts, I couldn’t halt the inevitable. Six visits to the Tidal Basin couldn’t stop it. Nearly 80 pictures, though pretty to look at, couldn’t capture and protect the sight. Not even three essays, complete with photos, could arrest the formidable march of time. The cherry blossoms, blowing and drifting in an inexorable snowfall hastened by a couple of windy, rainy days, with a small nod and fond smile back at us, standing there, mouths agape at what looks a little like a tragedy, are gone.
Now, look down to see the cherry blossoms
I’m not alone, mourning the departure of the blooms from these, the “loveliest of trees the cherry now, hung with bloom along the bow.” The speaker in that A.E. Housman poem (link here), at age 20, laments that he only has likely 50 more years to enjoy the blooms, focusing on both his and the blooms’ certain, eventual demise. Robert Frost, in “Nothing Gold can Stay” (link here) touches on the same thing when he says: “Nature’s first green is gold/ her hardest hue to hold/ her early leaf’s a flower/ but only so an hour…” Leave it to a poet or some blogger to take a perfectly splendid, universally beloved, unashamedly hopeful season like spring and spoil it for everybody with all this talk of loss and death.
Was Once a Billowy Cloud of White
Actually, there is still plenty of beauty here. I love the many shades of green mixed in with the browns and tans of dried blossoms and the little bunches of tiny, inedible cherries that hang from the trees. Set that against a robin’s egg blue spring sky and, actually, you see more colors, a much larger palette than the former riot of white and pink. Or at least the scene arrays itself in a different set of colors to love and appreciate.
Greens and browns and a few final blossoms
So the blossoms are gone. It’s o.k., really. The growing season is just beginning. More gardensful of flowers and plants and lovely green things, grass and leaves, are on the way. Even now, their firm tread sounds around he corner. Believe me, I’m in the first ranks of welcoming warmer weather with all its beauty and new life, promise and hope. We’re only just beginning.
Joy and fulfillment exist in both the receiving and in the letting go. To love the blossoms, to love life itself is easier than accepting loss, the good bye, death. And actually, thankfully, this is hardly a death. Neither the trees nor their beauty are going anywhere. Their life affirming presence and loveliness are still here, just not with a dramatic explosion of blossoms. It’s more subtle, now. Life comes and goes, and so does beauty, but maybe there are more beauties, more life affirmations around than I usually realize in my all-too-often cursory day, my hasty living, my rushing from here to there. I self-anesthetize with many things: food, drink, reading, watching and whatever else. I deaden, or at least hinder my view, my seeing, my appreciation for the life, the living that continues all around me.
Seeing the post-blossom scene reminds me to keep my eyes and ears and heart open all year, not just when brilliant blossoms force them to see, but after the blooms are gone, when there is still so much, maybe even more, to take in, to marvel at.
Post Blossom World
After:
Same Graceful Swoop
Before:
What a difference two weeks make.
I can relate:
Nosehair equivalent?
