it's this time of year here

I like to call it "blossom season." Because spring feels a little too cruel, seeing as friends and family elsewhere are still piled under banks of snow.

This time of year, all the cherry and plum trees burst into bloom overnight. One day, the branches are bare, and the next, they’ve popped open and the air smells like perfume and earth at the same time.

After a rain storm, dropped petals pile up in drifts on the city’s streets and secret stairways. Sort of like nature threw a party and it's the morning after, with spent confetti everywhere.

Our pooch likes to wear some on her nose.

indoor spring

Here in kooky California, the cherry trees have just started erupting in airy, delicate blooms and a perfume that smells just as light. Here, we walk through drifts of fallen blossoms on the sidewalk, while across the country, my parents’ front door remains sealed against more than four feet of snow.

So goes the weirdness of growing up on one coast and making a home on the other.

As I’ve been admiring the pale new clumps of blossoms, I noticed that we have an early spring still life of sorts on our mantel. We picked up this little glass fitting at a flea market recently, and turned it into a lamp with the flicker of a candle (there’s a little opening in the back so it doesn’t get too hot – but you could use a battery “candle” too). And the candlesticks in the background were a kind of accident: we were taking apart a busted lamp realized that the blocks making up the base were perfect candleholders, as is.

One of those happy realizations that surprises me as much as cherry blossoms in February.