The city becomes beautiful again

The cherry blossoms have come and gone now: two weeks of blooming and four days at the peak. A few pictures of my son enjoying the blossoms made their appearance on the Matthew Picture of the Day. The blooms are the most dramatic signal of the arrival of spring: there are a handful of other plants that bloom one way or another before the cherry trees do, but the cherry trees go from bare branches to large masses of fluffy pinkish-white rather dramatically.

Now the blossoms have blown away, and trees of every type are getting their leaves, and for a week or so the trees are all decorated in Spring Green. I had known about the Crayola color Spring Green since childhood, but it wasn’t until I was living in Ithaca that, after a characteristically long winter, I really understood what it meant. The very light and yellowish green of the nascent leaves on the trees across the street from my apartment were Spring Green; it was finally spring.

So now we begin the six or seven months in which the foliage and blooms of the plants around us make the city beautiful. This is capped by a month or so of fall foliage, after which nature’s beautification fades, slowly, and the seasonal decoration takes over. 

Between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, holiday lights make the otherwise bleak city beautiful. Strings of white lights outlining houses and filling in shrubs, some overdone, some very subtle: they compensate for the dwindling sunlight and dormant vegetation. In Ithaca, we got our first snow around Thanksgiving, here in DC it comes much later, usually in January. Snowfall is only very briefly beautiful, when it’s still piled up on otherwise bare branches, and while that on the ground hasn’t been disturbed very much. Then in a few hours, it drops from branches and twigs, and snowplows and other traffic have turned much of it into a dirty grey mush.

One thing I can’t understand is why it is that the holiday lights that made the streets seem so inviting in December look so tacky in the middle of January. The weather is the same, the hours of darkness are much the same, yet holiday lights, and the greens, golds, and reds of Christmas look fantastically out of place. I suppose we’ve been trained by the retail industry to appreciate bold reds and whites, à la Valentine’s day. Is there anyone who actually buys such seasonally-colored servingware from the yuppie housewares catalogs? And after Valentine’s day, as the dreary bleakness of winter presses on, we imagine spring in pastel colors. And then spring happens, like it’s happening now, here in DC.