There’s actually a single point on a clock when you can say the cherry blossoms have peaked in Washington D.C.
They build a whole festival around it and thousands of people come, but nobody knows exactly when the peak will be. Last year, for example, on the opening day of the festival, the blossoms were done, scattered to the ground like so many snowflakes. This year the peak was supposed to be last weekend, but cold weather stopped the buds from proceeding.
Then when the weather suddenly flipped amid a headache-inducing pressure change to the 90s all of a sudden, bango. They came out Tuesday and the peak was Wednesday morning at about 11 a.m. That was the time when all of the blooms were out and none of the pedals had started to flitter from the trees. Then they started to.
By this weekend, forecasted rain and wind will strip the trees one more time and all of those amateur photographers will be foiled again until next year.
But while it lasts, the cherry blossoms are a blast — a whole zone of cotton candy. People treat the white and pink pedals like red carpets, and shoot away on big cameras, little phones, and most silly looking at the Tidal Basin, their iPads, lifted before their faces like old glass plate view cameras minus the cloaked covering.
You may run into people while you focus, or people are always walking into your shot. You can’t help it. If people waited, things would jam up as much as the traffic around the basin. But everybody’s pretty nice, everyone basks in the ephemeral beauty and amid the heat that made the blooms come quickly after a long delay, nobody thinks about whatever happened to the spring that was supposed to happen between the winter cold and the summer heat.