The last day that the trees will hold onto all of their blossom

Friday Fragment #46

From the back gate, it was as far to walk to one tree as it was the other. Both were heavy with pink blossom: one the colour of candy floss and bridal silks, one of cupcake icing and cans of cream soda. Memory: chromatically sentimental and thus the most easy to reach of thesauruses; a limping merry-go-round of the visually synonymous. A bloom, lifted from a branch, perhaps in those indistinguishable middle hours between late night and early morning, and the first fallen flowers of the spring. They lay not underneath the tree to my left, nor the one to my right, but in a place between the two, almost in front of the gate, taken there by a gentle gust. Half an hour and a drop of rain later and I returned to notice several more bunches sat alongside the first – this time a spill of different blossoms showing coral-veined petals of bubblegum hue. (Again this evasion to define, and to limit describing to something singular; always this desire to circle towards what is common.) The day before they fell, I had walked the same stretch of road, underneath the pink of one tree and then the other, seen those boughs of incredible colour above me each time, full and weighty, and felt sure it would be the last day that these two trees would hold onto all of their blossom. In a few more days, each of delicate wind and mizzle of rain, and two, three and four tufts of colour will become a carpet of scattered pinks, a confetti across road and pavement, then later a shimmering channel of pigment with which to serenade the dour grey palette of road and kerbstone. Time and squall of weather further will wither and bite, and rot and sully them past their synonym shades of amaranth and rose and ballet slipper and watermelon, and pink will become brown, and brown will become grey: and the gutter and the drain will claim all that once shined so magnificently above. A matter of weeks and it will all be gone. Last year seemed to pass in just a few short days of blowing gale and hard rain, but perhaps I have remembered it wrong. As the beds of blossom swell, my daughter’s birthday comes round once again. She is nineteen. Nineteen, and yet still that handful of first heartbeats and screams against my chest in the operating theatre. Nineteen, but still six months old and being held by my mother, whose arms I had never before seen cradle a child. Nineteen, and now two years old and a sleeping, pulsing body, with a shock of soft curls that spreads across two pillows, sunken in the space between me and my wife. Nineteen, but also four years old, sat on my shoulders, the soft fat of her right calf yielding to the chubby flesh of my right palm, reaching for the branch of a tree overhead and bringing down over us both a deluge of freezing captured rainwater. Nineteen, and yet just two years ago, her tears, with her heart feared broken but merely bruised for the first time, and yet falling into my arms, falling hard into her father, and though sobbing, so quiet that I could hear my own heart pounding louder than everything else, and knew that she would be OK. The wind has picked up, a shower of the most beautiful pink: blossom, shimmering, holding on, twirling, drifting, pushed into the colour of others, receding, disappearing. But returning, beautiful, again, always. Returning always.

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