Were I to have been back in China and the world were something more like what it had been for the last two decades, I might have been trying to find a way to justify a trip to Tokyo this week. I have multiple clients I’m doing work for there and it wouldn’t have been hard. April, of course, is when the cherry blossoms explode across the country. If you catch it just right, the otherwise rather grey metropolis comes out of its chrysalis yielding city-blocks and blocks of pink. A few days later the leaves start to push the blossoms off and the green and pink juxtaposition is also remarkable.
I have dear friends who have an apartment along the canal at Naka Meguro in Tokyo. Apparently this was a rather fetid estuary during the seventies when Japan was rapidly emerging. But today, the water looks clean and doesn’t smell and it is one of the best spots in the city to sample the cherry blossoms when the time comes. So good, in fact, that it is mobbed and overrun with day trippers and nighttime revelers who like to share drinks beneath the falling iridescent blossoms.
The Wallkill Rail Trail here in New Paltz also has a stream that meanders along. And not unlike Tokyo made my way across and back the trail all winter and never noticed a cherry tree. Yesterday, on a late ride up towards Rosendale, I notice three small cherry trees in full bloom. They had not been clipped and trimmed to generate the greatest possible profusion of blossoms. They were comparatively spindly and sparse, but there they were nonetheless. And once you see the blossoms the bark looks immediately like cherry tree bark.
A bit gray outside today on Easter Sunday. My mom had kindly brought the girls over some chocolate yesterday. My little one (who is fifteen) asked and, no, I won’t be hiding any of it, expecting them tear open the living room in search for pieces. But I will do some kind of brunch quiche to approximate the feeling of Easter, here in our lonesome quarantine.
Sunday 04/12/20
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