First Blossoms

An awful day on Wednesday, I was walking around and tripping over my bottom lip. My heart was weeping. I was berating myself for my own shortcomings...worse than that, my body clock was screaming at me 'to hell with your plans, let's get this baby-show on the road.' Why does my body fight my mind this way? I felt as if I were nothing but a mess of amino acids, neural electricity; a tepid flush of ragged hormones.

After staring at the kitchen table for a while, a few fat tears plopping onto the formica, I dragged myself out and got on the bike. Always a great move. Soon I was weaving along new streets, just as the Izakaya mama-sans were plugging in their neon street-signs and sweeping the streets out front of their little noren curtains. Kid sounds from the baseball park. Notes from a tuba carried on the wind from the high school across the street.

I found a cherry-tree, still bony and dry with winter's chill. Peering closely, I saw the first round buds swelling on the branch - not yet green. This will be the tree I follow each week, until it bursts with fragile blooms.


It's an ordinary tree in an ordinary street, but for two weeks a year when it, like every other ordinary cherry tree becomes a flossy, chiffon beauty. I'm going to watch this tree unfurl, and revel in the process.


Hitting the roaring freeway, I held my breath till the lights changed and pushed through my thighs to clear the little hill, weaving around salary-men already giddy with the thought of their first beer. I've learned to remain a tourist in my own town, to marvel at the things we soon grow used to. Japan is an easy place to learn that lesson.

All the cherry branches slept, light and stark, full of hope.


Pushing up the hill toward the castle, zipping along the moat, riding like I was back in the bmx days of the past, troubles dropped away, falling like the city dust that pinged off my mud-guards. I cleared the top and cut away from the castle gates, the peach and plum groves opening below me in a fuzzy blur of watercolour.

I inhale air that skips over the dappled blossoms. It's a sweet light crush that lingers, but that you could never hope to capture in glass or plastic. Tears come to my eyes again, but they're fresh and light, like the blossoms, like a new page, like
a pause that holds the infinite.






The light drops away and I head for home, passing the artist packing away his brushes and paints, his painting drying on the easel, just visible in the dim of early evening. As I pass my cherry tree, an old lady walking her dogs smiles, nodding at me as she points out the road home.