The cherry blossoms didn’t come in this year, at least in Urbana, Illinois. An unseasonably warm February, followed by some walloping freezes, compromised their growth and left the April branches apparently bare. A few defied the odds. Here and there, as we picked our way through the local arboretum the day after Easter, we’d spot them: intrepid little blossoms, brave but fragile, waiting, it seemed, for a strong breeze to pry them loose. But mostly we just saw branches.
“It says they’re putting their energy into foliage,” Jes said, cupping her phone against the afternoon glare, “for survival.”
She had been reading the latest post from the arboretum’s “Sakura Watch,” and when she finished, her face, now thoughtful, tipped up to consider one of the cherry trees overhanging the walkway. My gaze almost followed hers. But then the day had been warm, and the park had been quiet, and my attention soon ranged out beyond the canopy and into that distant no-place where vision blurs into placid indistinction.
Absent, I toyed with the leash. At our feet the dog whizzed in the grass. Ten minutes later we were back in the car, not disappointed exactly but agreeing it really was too bad about the blossoms this year. But what could you do. We jostled the keys and burped the engine. We pulled out onto the street.
This spring might be our last in the Urbana area. After moving here nearly eight years ago, Jes and I have finally begun devising exit strategies, and next spring will likely find us searching for cherry blossoms in quite another location. Still, for all that it would seem a sour note to go out on, I can’t shake the sense that this pleasant, if gently disappointing visit to the local cherry blossoms makes for a satisfying conclusion.
Why that should be the case, I’d struggle to say. In fact I’m not sure I’d want to say, even if I could. After all, not every experience survives translation into meaning. Nor are all metaphors better for having been made intelligible. Instead, potent and potential (or maybe potent because potential), something about this anecdote—about its complex layering of Easter and the banal, of budding leaves but absent blossoms, of climatic stressors and adapting plant life—gets it right. It gets at the experience of change. It gets at how the present can feel suddenly supercharged with possibility. Or at how the ordinary, suffused with a fresh awareness of the recent past or approaching future, can turn abruptly strange.
Left to intuition, for me at least, this anecdote gets at how everything can feel the same, even when you know it’s not. Even when, perhaps, you wish it wasn’t.
I had reason to recall the cherry blossoms this past weekend. Jes and I had made a day trip for my sister’s 26th birthday. This birthday was my sister’s first since undergoing a heart transplant in July 2022—and her second since my family confronted the very real possibility that we might also be celebrating her last. I’m grateful it wasn’t. Even so, in the wake of the transplant, time has not worked the same. I feel its difference at birthdays. I feel its difference at holidays. Cyclical, recurring, these events have nevertheless perceptibly altered. They have become uncanny, familiar but not. They carry with them the trace of the one rupture that did happen and the other rupture that did not.
The first Thanksgiving since, I now think, I cannot help but think. The first Easter since.
Or less darkly: The music’s changed, but the rhythm’s the same. Only thank God it’s a healthy heart that’s now supplying the backbeat.
There is no normal to return to. There is no status quo preserved magically outside of time. Yet for all its unreality, we feel its absence and find our metaphors, intelligible or not, where we can. And where just one metaphors won’t do, we make others, heaps and heaps of them. Whole essays, even. Music and arboretums and cherry blossoms and Easter.
They’re putting energy into foliage, Jes read. They’re doing it for survival.

Ben DeVries (’15) graduated with degrees in literature and writing. He and his wife Jes, a fellow Calvin grad, live in Champaign, Illinois, where Ben is looking to add some letters behind his name. On the academic off-seasons, he reads fantasy and works as a glorified “go-fer” at the Champaign Park District. He’s been known to make a mean deep-dish pizza.