The Blossoms Were the Same for Everyone

It was Saturday, April 4. The cherry blossoms had come in on Huiu Jeong-ro that morning, and I went there in the afternoon. The street had been coming up in conversation for most of the week, the way a thing comes up a few times before you finally go. Before leaving I checked the weather app on my phone. Seventeen degrees, clear sky. I hung the camera around my neck, took a light jacket from the hook by the door, and went out for a walk.

Same Tree, Different Springs

Huiu Jeong-ro was already full when I arrived. The cherry blossoms had drawn out everyone who could come.

A woman in sunglasses had stopped in front of a café window to pose for a friend's camera, the petals coming down behind her. A little further on, two women walked slowly past a red brick wall, talking, looking up now and then.

The blossoms were the same for everyone. No one seemed to be having quite the same spring.

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A Phone Held Up

Walking the street that afternoon, I noticed that almost no one was alone. Couples, families, groups of friends, mothers and daughters. The only people walking by themselves seemed to be the ones with a camera around their neck.

So when I saw a woman lifting her phone to the blossoms by herself, I assumed there was someone she had come with, just out of the frame. The friend takes the proper photograph, the kind everyone in the group will end up seeing later. But every so often, in between, she lifts her own phone for a different angle, the kind only the person holding it gets to keep.

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Streets I Thought I Knew

A cherry tree in full bloom is a hard storefront to beat. For one week, the pizza place was a different pizza place. The noodle shop wore a different awning. The street took a week off from looking the way it usually looked.

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What One Tree Did

Every spring, this corner becomes its own small landmark. The single cherry tree leans over the Seoul Milk depot on the corner, and people line up across the street to get a picture of it. It must be, for two weeks each April, the most beautiful Seoul Milk depot in the country.

The Whole Avenue at Once

The wider stretch of Huiu Jeong-ro had become a tunnel of cherry blossoms, the kind you have to step into to understand. The trees on either side reached across and met in the middle, the whole length of the street held under a single white ceiling. People walked four abreast through it, slowing where the canopy was thickest, lifting phones, stepping aside for someone with a stroller, then walking on. The street had not been built for this many people. For one Saturday in April, it didn't seem to mind.

What stayed with me was that everyone was smiling. Not a posed smile, exactly. The smile that comes from being inside the very thing you wanted to come and see. The cafe-and-bar hadn't opened yet, but the crowd in front of it had, and they were perfectly fine waiting.

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What the Walls Kept

Every so often the wind would come up the street and lift the petals between the buildings. The people who had been walking slowed and stopped, looking up. It was a beautiful kind of rain.

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The shutter, when I lifted the camera, was the same kind of pause. Next April, when the blossoms come in again, I will be standing somewhere on this street with the camera around my neck, and I will want to remember exactly what I had done this time. The small line of numbers next to each frame will tell me, quietly. What lens I had on. How wide I had the aperture. How bright the afternoon had been. Exifmark keeps those numbers beside the photograph, so that the next time I am out in this kind of rain, I might do a little better than I did today.

To everyone on Huiu Jeong-ro that afternoon, having their own version of the street. I was glad to have been there too.