The Cherry Blossom

Blink and you miss them.

Cherry blossoms bloom for only a week, but that week bestows upon me a glorious view from my apartment window in Battery Park City.

Americans associate cherry blossoms with Washington DC and the annual Cherry Blossom Festival at the Tidal Basin.

Most of the thousands of cherry blossoms the Japanese gave the United States in 1912 were planted in DC.You also can find cherry blossoms in several other areas of the United States, including San Diego, Los Angeles and Philadelphia. And some ended up here in New York, and a few outside my window.

But this 18th floor window isn’t the first to afford me a view of cherry blossoms. Growing up on an army base in Japan, I could see a single cherry blossom tree from my window. The small tree didn’t hide the chain-link fence and the gravel field beyond, a field of broken tanks, row after row of tanks waiting for repair. Continue reading Sakura (Cherry Blossoms) Bloom