The Lusty Cherry

The Lusty Cherry

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Frequently writing about nature and the out-of-doors means that I often notice the same things every year. I’ve learned this by now — and have become more careful not to repeat an identical observation. Such was the case today when I thought about the Kwanzan cherry trees.

So I will not call this piece “The Other Cherry,” because I already used that title. But I will say that yesterday a grove of Kwanzan cherries once again stopped me in my tracks.

The trees were waving and petaling and being their lovely selves right in front of my office. I reveled in their peak bloom (and snapped some photos) as I ran out to the post office in the mid-afternoon.

I’m not the only one who appreciated them. Suzanne texted me this morning to say she’d noticed them on a run through my work neighborhood.

Every year I have this internal debate: Which is more lovely, the ethereal Yoshino or the lusty Kwanzan? I’ll never come up with an answer.

Town Square

Town Square

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Yesterday I ran up to the closest grocery store, which is located in shopping center I sometimes call “the corner.” I like the way it sounds, saying “I’m going up to the corner,” as if I lived in an old-fashioned neighborhood where people yell out their windows and hang their laundry on the line out back.

I don’t live in such a place, of course, and I don’t go to the corner much anymore, either. I’ve switched to a discount grocery chain that saves me money but lands me in anonymous strip malls off busy suburban highways.

At one time, when the children were young, I seemed to run into friends all the time at the local supermarket. But that’s been ebbing away for years, so I’d might as well drive a few more miles and save some cash.

Being back at the corner today reminds me of what I’ve missed, though, which is, in short, familiarity. I’ve been going to that grocery store as long as we’ve lived here. It feels homey, even though the produce is overpriced and the seafood is iffy.

For better or worse, that store — and the “corner” around it — are my town square, the closest thing I have to a meeting spot, where I rub shoulders with the people in my ‘hood.

(Vale School House, which is near another corner where I live.)

A Moment

A Moment

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Yesterday before my own evening walk, I took Copper for a short stroll. It was warm and breezy. We did our usual, torn-doggie-ACL-shortened amble. Before heading home we walked into the Morrison’s yard so I could pick up a throwaway paper that was left there.

And then, without warning, I had a moment. The wind was lifting pink blossom petals from the weeping cherry and swirling them around in a kind of pink snow. Two strings of wind chimes were rattling in a disjointed harmony. Copper, who can be cantankerous, was being sweet. I was aware of the softness of his fur and his big brown eyes.

I was overcome suddenly with a feeling of fulfillment, a realization that this is what it’s all about: walking the dog at the end of a long day, dinner still to get, labors ahead of and behind me — but in this moment free to breathe deeply, to listen and to think.

Coatless

Coatless

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The first time each season always feels strange, like jumping off a high dive or setting off in a tube on a fast-moving river. There is a similar lack of control. The coat will not be there if the weather takes a nasty turn. There is no turning back.

Today I took a jacket from the house but left it in the car. It was that balmy this morning, with the promise of more warmth to come. The wrap would have been superfluous. It would have been wadded up in my tote bag before I even reached the office.

So off I went, with only a sweater between me and the elements. No jacket, no coat. It wasn’t until I reached Metro that I realized I’d also left my umbrella. So now I’m coatless — and umbrella-less, too. It must be spring.

Baby Shade

Baby Shade

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As I’ve mentioned before, spring is farther along downtown and in Crystal City than where I live. Which means that when I strolled down the tree-lined stretch of Crystal Drive that leads to my office this morning, I was not seeing winter-wan trunks without a hint of green. Instead, I was walking beneath baby shade.

Baby shade comes from trees just leafing, still unsure what they’re meant to do. They are uncurling, unfurling, making themselves useful not just to the plant in general but also to the pavement below.

We on the pavement are remembering what it’s like to amble beneath a great arched umbrella of greenery: how it cools us and calms us, how it intercedes between heaven and earth.

Baby shade is wan and tentative, but it is all we have now, and it is precious in its fleetingness.

The Feeling of Clean

The Feeling of Clean

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The urge to spring clean is a real one, I think. As nature renews itself outside, there’s a strong need to spruce things up inside, to scrub and pound, to throw open the windows, to air things out.

The other day I washed bed linens, right down to the mattress casings. I dusted and vacuumed in a more deep-cleaning way than usual. As I fell asleep last night under a freshly laundered duvet cover, I pondered the feeling of clean.

There seems to be a tightness to it, as if fibers loosened over time have suddenly been compressed again, are back to their normal connections and boundaries. And there’s a lightness to it, too. Those compressed fibers take up less room.

The feeling of clean should motivate me to scrub and scour more often than I do. But, alas, it must always compete with the feeling of too-much-to-do.

Birds, Waking

Birds, Waking

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The birds wake to the crescendo of the kettle boiling. It is one of those sounds they have come to know means humans are nearby. They also thrill to the toilet flushing and the hall door squeaking.

What they love best, though, is the sound of water running. Does it remind them of some avian past when their relatives roosted near brooks and springs so they could sip small drops in that way birds do, a way that is more of a splash than a drink?

Or do they simply love the sound of it best, as I prefer Brahms and Mendelssohn? I’ll never know, of course. But I do know that I thrill to the sound of their waking, to the warbling and the rustling, to the   peeps and songs of these feathered creatures, so small, so delicate, so alive in every way.

Procession of Bloom

Procession of Bloom

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According to my favorite weather site, the cherry blossoms may last as long as 10 days this year. Though I haven’t checked on the Tidal Basin flowers since Monday evening, I can tell by the hordes on Metro that hanami is still in full force.

As the blooming season moves out to my neighborhood (always a few days later than the city trees), my ho-hum daily drives are taking on a hanami quality of their own. I’m slowing down, seeking out the streets I know from years past.

There are the Bradford pears in Franklin Farm, the redbuds on Folkstone, the Kwanzan cherry in my own front yard. All of this, if the weather cooperates, in a slow steady procession through dogwoods and azaleas — a riot of bloom that takes us from the gray trunks of winter all the way to the vivid fuchsias and scarlets of  mid-May.

Happy National Walking Day!

Happy National Walking Day!

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It’s the first Wednesday in April, which the American Heart Association has deemed National Walking Day. You can go on their website and read about the health benefits of walking, the best warm-up stretches and how to prevent injury.

Notable to me is the word “National.” Most countries don’t need a Walking Day to get their citizens up and moving. In many parts of the world, if you don’t walk you don’t work and you don’t eat.

I see no need to extol the benefits of walking more today than other days. There’s a reason why I named this blog A Walker in the Suburbs. But I will point out that in one of my favorite cities in all the world, walking is not just popular on National Walking Day but all year long.

New York City is a walker’s paradise. It’s the place Alfred Kazin describes in A Walker in the City, to which this blog tips its hat. It’s no coincidence that lively walking cities are lively cities, period.

There is something about a human that loves a walk. And what better day to remind ourselves of that?

Hanami

Hanami

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I just happened upon the ranger talk at the Tidal Basin last evening at 6 p.m. I’d decided to see the cherry blossoms after work, and then, impulsively, walked counterclockwise instead of the other way around. And there, at the FDR Memorial, was a green-suited ranger with a Smokey the Bear hat.

He was speaking of L’Enfant when I arrived, but went on from there to cover the flood of 1881, the creation of the Tidal Basin and the ugly construction-site look of the land around it at the turn of the 19th century. He described National Geographic writer Eliza Scidmore’s 24-year campaign to plant Japanese cherry trees around the basin, a quest that finally took root, so to speak, when President Taft’s wife, Helen, became interested in the project. (The lantern above commemorates the spot where Taft planted one of the first cherry trees.)

There are other twists and turns to this story and how cherry trees came to dominate the landscape around the Washington and Lincoln monuments. But my favorite part of the talk came when the ranger talked about the Japanese custom of hanami or “flower viewing” of the sakura or cherry blossoms.

The sakura represents a “short life, well-lived,” the ranger said, and for that reason was revered by both samurai warriors and kamikaze pilots. Hanami celebrates the fleetingness of the blossoms, the beauty that is ours just for a moment — and more lovely because of it.