12 feb

The promise of spring. I am reminded of it daily when walking outside the door at Chassenat. A group of flowers (crocusses?, daffodils?, tulips?) is breaking through the earth and trying to catch so much daylight that it will be able to bloom one of these days.
I also am reminded of spring while reading sometimes. Like the Japan book. ‘The Japanese love cherry blossom, precisely because its bloom is so fleeting before it gently flutters to earth’, according to the mathematics professor Masahiko Fujiwara. ‘If cherry blossoms were in full bloom for six months’ he added, ‘no Japanese would love them.’
I suppose he is right. I am kind of a specialist in cherry blossoms. Uden, the town where I grew up, is famous for its cherries called Ujese Zwarten (the black ones from Uden). Both our neighbours had plenty of trees. I do remember the blossoms, but could not see it as an inferior period to the time when the fat cherries were ripe. It was a stage one had to endure to get the main thing, and it would be smart to make the best of the enduring by saying something like: beautiful blossom.
I just think about another blossom story. An old friend of my old grandmother once told me, after she heard I had visited the Kroller Moller Museum (The best Van Gogh-museum in the world – the best museum whatsoever in the world!) if I had seen The Blossoming Peachtree, her favourite painting.
I kind of remembered it, but didn’t think it was very special. The next time I went to this museum (almost next door), I went to have a serious look. I saw a skimpy tree, with skimpy blossom. I thought that Van Gogh’s rough painting style was not suited for de delicacy of the subject.
But opinions, or taste, are a fluid thing. Just because this nice old woman liked the painting I had to go and have a look at it every time I visited the museum. And pretty soon I was as much in love with it as she was. Is it my favourite is the question I ask myself now, because it would be obvious to state at least which other Van Gogh painting it would be in the case it is not. No, it is not my favourite, and I do not know which one is. Will have something to think about one day walking.
Back to blossoms. I do know what my favourite blossom is. The Magnolia. Ok, there are many magnolia’s. I like the big, fat, round blossoms, the ones that caused it to be called the Tulip tree. I even liked those when I was a boy. I remember the detours I would take in magnolia blooming season, coming back from school, just in order to see as many of these gorgeous trees as possible. I can still envision the places where the trees stood, and probably still stand.

I tried to convince my dad, the master of the garden (in his own eyes) of planting a magnolia in the front yard. He didn’t want to do that. The bloom is okay he claimed, but the rest of the year it has the most boring leaves. And then, he went on, the bloom is only nice when it doesn’t rain. And this is Holland boy, it will never take long before it rains.
It was a perfect example of the nonsense that parents can come up with as an excuse to leave things as they are, I remember thinking. When I grow up, I decided then and there, I will plant my own tulip tree. Pretty soon after this scene with my dad in the front garden I started growing. But somehow something went wrong. The tulip tree never came. Now I am almost turning fifty, it is about time to really grow up.