Filipineses

No sighting in my past could have prepared me for cherry blossoms. The closest perhaps would have been the sprigs of kakawati in summer. But they didn’t create canopies of tender pink, recoloring the sky, which cherry blossoms do. Entranced on my first spring in North America, I lost every word that would mean, awe, toddling with eyes up and dropped jaw through rows of them in full bloom at Washington Square in Manhattan, later at Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and the Jefferson Mall in Washington, DC.

Today, where I live in Vancouver, BC, I simply race the wind two blocks from home to neighboring streets and get suffused in hues of silky pink. I’ve joined revelers with Vancouver Haiku Group, of which I’m a member, on Sakura (cherry blossom) Days, as well, at Van Dusen Gardens. Still, no matter the jamming, shared cheer, especially shrieks of children seeing them for the first time in other gatherings like at the Japanese cenotaph at Stanley Park in honor of Japanese Canadians who fought in WWI, the Burrard St. Skytrain station, and countless streets in the city, always a hush falls on many stunned by the pink glow.

Whispers, in fact, hint at reverence for me, during scheduled viewings, usually three days—like they say of women, at the “peak of their beauty”—because on the fourth day, a pink drizzle might begin. Uncannily, too, the wind as if in haste, might follow with gusts, causing a petal storm that would inundate sidewalks and lawns. Blue skies, then soon reappear within a week through bare-again crowns, while brownish leaf sprouts spike the nodes, as the cherry trees revert to just-trees.

As brief as a held-breath, perhaps explains the urgency behind viewings and festivals as timing must coincide with the trees’ inner clocks. While the flowers as harbinger of spring should bloom at almost the same time as last year, dates had not seemed to be exact and flowering happens in waves; buds burst early in warmer regions, and on to cooler areas, climbing northward to higher places, according to my readings. Like right now here at home, while a ‘daily watch’ website has reported several viewings, including the Accolade cherry blossoms at City Hall, trees in my Marpole neighborhood have yet to bloom.

Picture almost identical scenes of families and friends swarming under the blossoms in Japan, where viewings started during the Edo period, and to this day, picnicking, sipping sake and tea as depicted in kimono embroidery, woodblock prints, canvas and porcelain paintings and other arts. Duplicate this in Europe, South America, Australia, and Canada, crowding under the blossoms, perhaps like the now 50,000 trees in Vancouver, gifts from the Japanese, and you find a world enrapt.

Would some of them, wrapped in beauty, be pondering on ‘the transience of things’? And perhaps, accept with gentle sadness the ‘pathos of our existence’? If so, then viewing cherry blossoms would be for naught; it could even be a source of strength like how Japanese soldiers expecting defeat in Leyte apparently asked that they be “permitted to bloom as flowers of death”, echoing the last known message that invoked, “Sakura, Sakura”, earlier in the Battle of Peliliu (Palau), where like cherry blossoms so soon shed in millions, 10,000 said to be mostly young fell.

While I have ceased to wonder why Sakura festivals begin to swirl as soon as buds sort of break into a smile, first, and then, as if overnight, burst full-faced to cover what had been ghostly gnarled limbs in the winter, and then, in a whiff, as if by a sleight of hand, they’re gone, nothing prepared me for the subtle transformations wrought by cherry blossom storms. Think how evanescent beauty really is, how ephemeral life could be, how close our own existence to the cherry blossoms, indeed.

Published in Peregrine Notes (Alegria Imperial) at The Market Monitor, Manila, Philippines, March 16, 2015