This picture was like a time machine today. I was scrolling...

This picture was like a time machine today. I was scrolling through some old photos and landed on this one, which was taken on March 21, 2019. Just a little over a year ago. And it made me stop and think about how the cherry trees are in full bloom right now, and they are just as beautiful and true and faithful as they were the year before. They still bloom even when the world is at crisis.

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This photo took me back to 2019, but then it guided me even further into the past, to when I was a girl climbing a cherry tree in the front yard of the house I grew up in.

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When I was 2 months old, my mom’s friend gave me a sapling cherry tree. My family planted that little wisp of a tree in the front yard. Every year, my grandparents would take a picture of me with my cherry tree. In the beginning, my mom would hold me beside it, because the tree and I were both quite small. But as I grew, so did the tree, and soon I was climbing it’s limbs, finding shelter beneath its snowy blossoms in spring, it’s lush greenery in summer, it’s golden leaves in autumn, and even it’s bare, cold branches in winter.

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I have not seen my cherry tree in years, not since my family moved from Decatur in 1998. But I hear the tree is still there, a mighty sentry in that childhood yard. And that it still blooms, even when the world feels as if it has stopped.

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A few months ago, before the pandemic was even a thought, my Opa said to me, “When the world feels dark and hopeless, plant a tree. You might not ever see that tree grow into maturity, but the future generations will.”