And before you know, it, they bloom forth in color, striking against an incomparably blue spring sky:
The pink trees are the most prolific, paper-thin petals so numerous that they cake the branches:
The branches reach upward toward the sun, the warm source that drives their built-in clocks, coaxing them to come forth.
There had always been a fantastical source to my admiration of cherry blossoms. When I see a cluster of trees, I am reminded of a favorite childhood epic saga, The Condor Heroes, set in China, filmed in Hong Kong, and dubbed in Vietnamese. My dad used to rent the 10 to 20 VHS tapes of different sword-fighting sagas to keep me entertained, and in The Condor Heroes, the heroine, Hoang Dung lives on a well-fortified island, Dao Dao Hoa (Island of the Cherry Blossoms) with her father. When she sneaks off to Mainland China to see the world, she meets her husband-to-be, Quoc Tinh. The two have many adventures together in a fun, carefree, slightly awkward teenage-first-love-coming-of-age story, until he angers her one day and she runs back to hide on her home island. There is a certain way to walk through the maze of cherry blossom trees surrounding the periphery of the island, and without knowing the correct path, one could get lost and disoriented, never finding the way out. Hoang Dung traps Quoc Tinh in the maze for a time before finally reluctantly forgiving him and helping him out.
There is a Vietnamese old wives' tale cautioning people against planting cherry blossoms in their front yard if they have a daughter. Chances are, a rogue boy will become enamored with the cherry blossoms' beauty, symbolic of the frail demeanor and innocent beauty of daughters, and steal her away from her family.
The cherry blossom is a Japanese icon, and annual festivals celebrate Japanese-American sister cities, hearkening to the 1912 gift of cherry blossom trees from Tokyo to Washington D.C. as a gesture of friendship.
White cherry blossom trees are striking, too, a soft snow robe draping delicately on dark tree branches:
Most of all, cherry blossoms are symbolic of the swift and ephemeral human life, here and gone in the blink of an eye. The swiftly blooming, swiftly fading blossoms give way within just a few weeks' time to dark leaves that hang on the tree for the rest of the year until winter winds cause them to shed. Pathways are littered with the pink flowers, and soft springtime breezes blow the delicate petals in the air, raining pink confetti on me as I walk.
As Ezra Pound writes about their evanescence:
"The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough."
