BLOSSOMS.

I wrote this on April 15, 2014, the day the National Park Service declared the Tidal Basin’s pink cherry blossoms in Washington, D.C. at full bloom. It took me back, and it made me want to write. Can’t wait to experience a spring in D.C. again someday!

D.C. blossoms, Spring 2013

The pink popcorn tree hung low over my car as I pulled into the driveway last night. It was dark but my car lights had illuminated the clean white and pink festival above. The blossoms were finally here! I had been watching the spindly, low hanging tree outside my apartment over the previous dull-weathered weekend, wondering when the small buds would burst and reveal the small delicate puffs inside.

As I stepped out of the car I remembered what I had forgotten about blossoms: they carried the sweet, clean scent of spring. It was both refreshing and intoxicating all at once. I didn’t want to go inside my apartment. I stood right under the blossom canopy that hung low around my tall frame and just breathed in blossom. The small petals tickled my nose and face as I breathed in and out, in and out. I could have stayed there all night.

The fresh scent of these blossoms outside my apartment in Utah took me back to precisely one year earlier, to the famous cherry blossoms surrounding the Tidal Basin pool at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. 

The arrival of the blossoms in D.C. had wreaked havoc on my hay fever, and it turned out the Jefferson was more than a mile away from where I was interning in the U.S. Senate office buildings, but I didn’t care. I made every excuse to visit the blossoms during their fleeting stay- they only last about two weeks. I visited the blossoms in the morning before work, took bike rides around the Tidal Basin at night, strolled with friends there on the weekends. Just being there was renewing. 

D.C.’s blossoms are absolutely gorgeous and breathtaking. The endless pink and white puffs outlining the water of the tidal basin is an overwhelming sight; the blossoms are everywhere you looked. And so are the tourists. But you really can't help but be happy to see so many people in wonder, enjoying the beauty and the welcome spring weather together. And the scent. The sweet, clean scent enveloped you and was detectable from blocks away; up the busy crowded roads and walkways of the National Mall.

I wish I could be there to see the blossoms again in D.C., but it is lovely to experience my own little blossom festival at my small apartment in Salt Lake City with the small blooming tree outside my door. 

Today I’m just feeling grateful for spring. Thank goodness for this change in seasons. Thank goodness for beauty: for greening grass and flowering buds and blossoms. While I can agree with most when they say they don’t enjoy the cold, bitter winter, it is almost all worth it, just to see and appreciate the earth as it transitions into summer again. To see families taking walks outside, kids playing soccer at the nearby park, to be able to wander outside in the evenings. Summer is my JAM!