Why We Love Late Bloomers
In Washington, D.C., we have a ritual. It's a very busy ritual involving a lot of walking and a fair amount of violence against your fellow man. Every year, around this time, a great many people descend upon the Tidal Basin to witness the cherry blossoms. They come from all over the region, smelling of sunscreen and ambition, to see the pink petals before the wind whisks them away. It is a beautiful thing. It's also a bit of madness.
I grew up in the suburbs here. I moved into my parents' house when I was four years old. There was a cherry tree in the yard then and there is a cherry tree in the yard now. How it got there is a mystery, like the origin of the universe or why people enjoy black licorice. It was just there. But here's the thing about the family tree: it's a late bloomer.
While the crowds at the National Mall are elbowing each other for the perfect shot, our tree is bare. It sits there, indifferent to the schedule. It waits until the Tidal Basin blossoms are nothing but a stepped-on memory on a sidewalk. Two weeks, sometimes a month later, our tree finally decides to wake up. It missed the party. It didn't care. It was busy becoming itself.
I work at a camera store part time, and the weeks following peak bloom, people come in with their rolls of film and memory cards, hoping they caught lightning in a bottle. Some of the photos are magnificent. Some are blurry and have fingers in the corner. But I’ve decided that none of them are failures. To look at something beautiful and want to keep a piece of it...that's a noble human impulse.
Growing up, my mother used that late-blooming tree as a backdrop in her personal studio. There's a photo of me (if it's not in this post, it's being searched for still) - a small, bowl-cut version of myself in a green sweater, standing on the porch and smiling. It was probably the only time of the year she ever got a decent photo of all three of her kids. We were difficult subjects, the tree was not. It just existed.
I have a habit of personifying things, it's one of my eccentricities. I look at that tree every year and I feel a genuine sense of relief that it gets its moment. It isn't a "National Landmark." No one's busing in from Ohio to see it. But it gets its day in the sun nonetheless. It is just as bright, just as soft, and just as vital as its famous siblings downtown. It's just a little late, is all.
If a tree can wait until the noise has died down to show the world its best self, then certainly, so can you, stranger. There's a persistent lie that beauty and confidence have an expiration date. That if you didn't bloom "on schedule," you somehow missed the boat. That's total nonsense. You're allowed to take your time. You're allowed to be the "after-party."
We don’t care about the peak bloom calendar. We care about the version of you that exists right now. The one that's finally decided it’s time to be seen, photographed, and enjoyed. Whether you’re twenty-two or sixty-two, it’s a fine time for a portrait. The sun is out, the light is good, and your day in the sun is exactly when you decide it is.
When you're ready, we'll make you into art.
-Marvin
