Equinox

It’s March 19, the first day of Spring. I don’t recall a Spring Day 1 earlier than March 21, but the vernal equinox comes when it comes. It’s a Leap Year, so maybe that plays into the early-ish start of the season. I’m not going to delve too deeply into this. This is math and science, which are not my departments. I like to stay in my lane. 

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And it’s a beautiful beautiful day, though 20 degrees colder than I would like. Our neighborhood, gray and drab just a few short weeks ago, is a riot of color; cherry blossoms and daffodils and forsythia and flowering pear and tulips and irises coming out all over the place. The grass is green, thanks to a warm spell a few weeks ago. It’s lovely. 

That's my mailbox, hiding in the forsythia
that is in turn shaded by a cherry tree

We are very lucky, we here in my little neighborhood. Our streets are lined with cherry trees, hundreds of them. We don’t have to go anywhere near the Tidal Basin if we don’t want to. I do love to see the original cherry trees with the monuments sparkling behind them, but the Tidal Basin is a scene this week. It’s no place for the faint of heart. I’ma stay right here and look at my own cherry trees. I can see them right from my kitchen window. 

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WTOP is our local news radio station. Like most other news radio stations, WTOP covers the same stories all day long, repeating the same program every 30 minutes with slight updates as information changes, especially concerning the all-important traffic and weather. Like everyone else in the DMV, I’m obsessed with traffic reports, so I listen to WTOP a lot when I’m in my car. 

Cherry trees bloom in multiple stages - eight I think. The cycle begins when the very first signs of blossoms begin to appear to the much-anticipated peak bloom. That whole cycle, from early signs through peak bloom, takes about two weeks. Somewhere between March 1 and March 10, the first signs appear, and then WTOP reporters are on 24-hour cherry blossom watch. As the cherry blossoms mature, WTOP devotes at least 5 minutes of every 30 to cherry blossom updates. It’s a big local story; even bigger this year because the National Park Service just announced its plans to cut down 150 cherry trees ahead of a project to shore up the seawall around the Tidal Basin (don’t worry, there are about 4,000 trees around the Basin, so the 150 won’t make a hugely visible difference). 

The National Park Service shares predictions on peak bloom (surprisingly specific - not “sometime in the third week of March” but “1 PM on March 22”) and then updates their forecast based on expected weather conditions. An early warm spell will speed up the process but will also speed up the end of the blooming period; whereas a cold snap that follows an early period of warmth, will extend the peak period by a few days. That is where we are now. We had a few warm days last week, and peak bloom occurred very early. But then it got quite cold, and the blooms are holding on nicely. Everywhere I go, people are discussing the cherry blossom forecasts - either first-hand reports from their own Tidal Basin visits, or second-hand updates from the live feeds or WTOP. It’s the talk of the town. Everyone in DC is a botanist in March. 

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I got my hair cut on Tuesday night (my hair lady had just been to the Tidal Basin the previous day) and rejoiced in the still-present daylight as I drove home at 6:15 PM. A wave of nostalgia hit me - hit me hard - as I caught a glimpse of a Rockville High School kid getting out of a minivan, backpack on one shoulder and softball gear bag on the other. Was it just a year ago that I was still a Rockville baseball mom? On that very day a year earlier, I thought, I was probably on my way home from a baseball scrimmage. It was cold on Tuesday, so I looked on the bright side. I loved high school baseball but at least I don’t have to spend two hours sitting in a camp chair wrapped in a blanket on a 40-degree windy March day. And then I noticed the signs advertising Rockville’s annual mulch sale, an all-hands-on-deck volunteer effort that takes up a whole Saturday, a Saturday that is invariably rainy or cold (it snowed on our first mulch sale day in 2016). I miss being a high school parent. I miss band concerts and swim meets and baseball games. But I don’t miss mulch sale. Mulch sale can go fuck itself. 

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Well, that was rude. But you know what I mean. 

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It’s Friday now, still cold but bright fresh spring-y cold, which is the best kind, I guess. The Washington Capitals just got in on the cherry blossom action, releasing a new sky-blue jersey festooned with cherry blossoms. They’re late to this game. The Nationals and the Wizards have had cherry blossom gear for several years now. We’ll see what these jerseys look like tonight, when we attend what is likely to be our last Capitals game for the season. Hockey is a winter sport unless your team is in the playoffs, and the Capitals are not going to go very far in the playoffs if they make it at all, which isn’t likely. 

For years, the Capitals were a playoffs mainstay. They only won the Stanley Cup once, in 2018, but you could pretty much always depend on them to at least reach the post-season. But nothing is permanent. Gray early March gives way to screaming pink and  yellow late March and then just as you get used to the forsythias and the cherry blossoms; just when you start to think that all this beauty is yours to keep, it’s gone. If you remember nothing else that late March in the DMV teaches us, remember that everything is fleeting. 

Wouldn't it be nice to keep walking under these
trees all summer long?
They'll only look like this for a few more days.