Friendships In Bloom

OK, so those of you who follow Farley and Reagan know that there's a TX meet-up in San Antonio . . . tonight . . . at like 5:30 . . . that I'm missing.  I know, I know, I'd hoped to make it, even though I'm four hours down the road from them. I wanted to meet them and laugh with them and hang out for a bit. But with my daughter at home from college and with gas prices climbing toward $4 per gallon and with our foreign exchange student coming Tuesday next week, I just couldn't swing it. This time. Reagan, if you're reading this . . . could you SKYPE me from the restaurant so I could virtually be there?  Pretty please with a cherry on the top?  OK, that's my pitiful attempt to get there even though I can't make it.  Speaking of cherries:

"In the cherry blossom's shade
there's no such thing
as a stranger." 
- Kobayashi Issa

It was after a third-grade benchmark test, actually, that I first learned the story behind the Cherry Blossom Trees in Washington D.C.  The boy who needs a quiet environment and takes the test with me eagerly shared all of the details from his favorite story. It was a story about friendship, he told me, a gift from a Japanese dignitary to President Taft and his wife. When the first batch of 2000 trees was infected with insects and nematodes, they sent another 3020 to replace the diseased ones. Today they serve as a symbol of friendship, he added. So interesting. All I knew was that they are breathtaking! Here's a picture I took when I was in D.C. last spring:

Cheryl over at Primary Graffiti created an amazing unit using the book Cherry Blossom Friends by Corkey Hay DeSimone.

Debbie Tenzer over at Do One Nice Thing recently shared this amazingly BeAuTiFuL time-lapsed footage of the Blossoms in Brooklyn.  Do yourself a favor and watch the magic unfold before your eyes: